The Freedom Writers Diary

A young man walking down the beach observed an old man picking up starfish that had washed up on the shore. As he got closer, he saw the old man throwing them back into the ocean. He approached the man and asked, “What are you doing?” The old man replied, “If I don’t throw the starfish back in the water, they’re going to die.” “But there must be thousands of beaches and millions of starfish. You can’t save them all. Don’t you know you’ll never make a difference!” The old man reached down and picked up a starfish and simply replied, “I’ll make a difference to this one.”

“Why can’t you just be a normal teacher?”

Actually, normalcy didn’t seem so bad after my first snafu. I took my students to see Schindler’s List in Newport Beach, at a predominately white, upper-class theater. I was shocked to see women grab their pearls and clutch their purses in fear. A local paper ran a front-page article about the incident, describing how poorly my students were treated, after which I received death threats. One of my disgruntled neighbors had the audacity to say, “If you love black people so much, why don’t you just marry a monkey?”

All this drama and I didn’t even have my teaching credentials yet. Luckily, some of my professors from University of California—Irvine read the article and invited my class to a seminar by the author of Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally. Keneally was so impressed by my students that a few days later we got an invit‍

truly self-reliant person takes action, leaving nothing to chance and everything to themselves. She showed me that excuses will not bring about success and that adversity is not something you walk with, but something you leap over. The only obstacles are the ones you allow. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A truly self-reliant person finds his weak link and strengthens it