English teacher Marcella Oathout’s 2014 and 2015 students have once again accumulated their anonymous journal entries to publish the short book In Our Own Words: Volume 2.
Oathout’s students watched the movie Freedom Writers in class. In the movie, students from a troubled neighborhood keep journals about their lives and their feelings that they share with their teacher. Their final assignment for the year is to compile their journal entries into a book they publish.
The students in Oathout’s 2014 and 2015 classes recreated this assignment. They wrote their own journal entries and submitted them. This assignment proved to be very different than the typical English essay. Students have the freedom to write about whatever they please. Grammar, language, and length do not matter. This freedom was refreshing from the usual constricting topics students are usually assigned.
“The point was to give everyones different view and the realization that you don’t know everything that’s going on in peoples’ life” explains junior Carolyn Barton who goes on to say that the journals show “a deeper side of York Suburban rather than what everyone else sees”.
Although the journals were a way for the students to express themselves, their entries were published anonymously. The reader learns about many different stories but not the faces behind them. Junior Abby Eisenhart expressed that she thought “it was a good way to show your feelings without being pointed out.” Barton added on saying that she’s glad her “personal information was not shown to the world.”
As the title of the newest book points out, this is not the first time Oathout has published one of these books. Volume 1 of In Our Own Words is available in the library for students to read. The book is almost identical to the more recent one except it contains the stories of students from the years before. After looking through some of the stories, junior Kelsey Abel was “shocked to hear some of the things students have gone through”.
Although in previous years, students kept their journals for a long period of time, this years students only had their journals for about a week. Many of the students were disappointed in this as they actually began to enjoy the assignment. In fact, some students are contemplating continuing this assignment in their free time.
Junior Jon Abel expressed interest in starting a journal of his own, explaining that “the entries from the project really helped me with my stress, especially since the end of the school year is approaching along with senior year.” Barton adds onto this saying that she “used to have a journal but I don’t have enough time anymore.”