Segregation and How It Is Portrayed In the Media Akeelah and the Bee and Freedom Writers are two different videos, which have much in common, and at the same time are two different stories. The first movie, Akeelah and the Bee tells the fascinating story about the eleven-year-old girl Akeelah Anderson, a young girl from South Central Los Angeles. She has a gift for words and likes taking part in various spelling contests. However, when she finds out that her peers do not like smart kids, the girl refuses to take part in no more spelling contests, as Akeelah prefers communicating with her friends rather then winning one more prize in the contest. Similar to “Freedom Writers”, Akeelah and the Bee deals with very important social issues, and sheds light on segregation, making the film obviously worthwhile watching it. It tells the story about friendship, fear, upper and lower class segregation, lying to parents and cheating grace, and love to people who, probably, do not deserve it (Akeelah and the Bee, 2006).
Overall, the film inspires the viewer the thought that winning is not the most important thing in the world. What concerns “Freedom Writers”, the very name of the movie was a pun on the word combination Freedom Riders, the term associated with mostly African American and white college students. (Freedom Writers, 2007) These students in 1961 interstate the buses into the segregated southern U.S. in order to test civil rights laws, which were newly formed. According to these laws, racial segregation was outlawed in interstate transportation facilities such as railroad terminals ad bus stations. Freedom Riders is about a young teacher, who encourages her at-risk students’ class to learn tolerance and to pursue education beyond high school.
The Homework on Akeelah and the Bee
Akeelah Anderson is a young, eleven year old schoolchild who is a littlemature and learns at the school of Crenshaw Middle School. She hasdeveloped many new changes from the beginning of the movie until the end. Towards the beginning of this story, Akeelah was just a normal schoolgirl. Well, normal meaning that she went to school just like everybody. Although,she wasn’t doing quite well in ...
The youth gets from the teacher the thing they need most – a voice of their own. A white teacher, Hilary Swank (Erin Gruwell), brings hope to black poor students and helps them to realize themselves and to survive in this ugly and cruel world (Voynar, 2007).
There are two most important episodes in the film. The first one is the scene when Eva, one of the students, becomes an involuntary witness of a racially motivated shooting that was committed by her boyfriend. Eva is pressured and threatened by the gang and is forced to lie and lay the blame on her black classmate. The second scene is an episode when Gruwell finds a racist caricature of the black student and tries to explain that this caricature is almost the same like it was in the Nazis camps, when they used the same to publish of Jews.
She asks then whether her students know what the Holocaust is, and realizes than nobody knows. Gruwell understands that all her students are living in a war zone, and most of them have at least one friend or family member die in a gang-related violence. She tries to draw a parallel in order to inspire the students and bring them hope. The teacher gives them The Diary of Anne Frank and goes with the students to the Holocaust Museum to meet those people, who managed to survive these dreadful events. For the first time Gruwell lets the students see a completely different world outside the cruel and violent world in which all of them got used to live. Gruwell inspires them to write in journals, and these students journals, published in the book “Freedom Writers make them understand that they have more in common than all those differences that might divide them. In contrast to Akeelah and the Bee, “Freedom Writers” seems to be more serious portrayal of segregation in the media, however, both of them tell the story of bringing hope. Both “Freedom Writers” and Akeelah and the Bee introduce an incredibly high emotional depth. Akeelah and the Bee shows hope for all those people whose life seems to be hopeless.
The Essay on The Enlightenment Writers Freedom Write Ideas
The Enlightenment Writers The central ideas of the Enlightenment writers were similar to, yet very different from, those of the writers of earlier periods. Four major Enlightenment writers were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. Their main purpose was to write to educate and edify and not so much as to write for aesthetic purposes. Most of their work was designed ...
Both films are great, being, probably, the best films of the genre one have ever seen in a long time. References Akeelah and the Bee. (2006).
Retrieved April 16, 2008, from www.imdb.com/title/t/ Freedom Writers. (2007).
Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0463998/ Voynar, K. (2007, January 6).
Review: Freedom Writers. Retrieved April 16, 2008, from Cinematical Web: http://www.cinematical.com/2007/01/06/review-freed om-writers/.
