His name was Sharaud, and Erin Gruwell remembers him as “the most incorrigible student I ever encountered.” She met him early one September morning in 1993, her first day as a student English teacher. A supervisor brought Gruwell, then 24, to Room 203 of Woodrow Wilson High School, in Long Beach, California, and disappeared.

Looking around, Gruwell—wearing a polka-dot dress and pearls—stared up at Sharaud, six feet tall and all muscle. A disciplinary transfer from another school, he glared at her, then stalked down the aisle past his classmates—most of them at-risk teenagers bused in to the middle-class school from gang-infested neighborhoods nearby.

Gruwell doesn’t remember feeling physically threatened, “partly because I was naïve.”” She felt overwhelmed, though, and left school later that day on the verge of tears, fearing she was too young and too white to succeed with this class. But she returned to school the following day and stayed. “I had come to do a job and I was going to finish it,”” she says.

Flash forward 15 years. Today, at 39, Gruwell—“Ms. G.” to her students—is known throughout the educational world as the teacher who took her students on a life-shaping journey that resulted in the 1999 publication of a collection of diary entries they wrote, The Freedom Writers Diary. In January, 2007, her memoir, Teach With Your Heart: Lessons I Learned From the Freedom Writers, arrived in bookstores three days before the opening of the film version of her story, Freedom Writers, starring Hilary Swank as Gruwell. The entries in the diary—unsigned to enable the authors to write frankly—ranged widely. “I don’t remember when I actually pulled the trigger,” one youth wrote about a gunfight he’d survived. “All I remember is shooting and waiting until the other guy was out of bullets.” Another boy detailed his best friend’s accidental death in a game of Russian roulette. Sometimes the pictures were rosier. One boy reveled in landing a college football scholarship. Another, confronted with failing grades, wrote something Ms. G. told him “that would change my life forever: She told me she believed in me.”

The catalyst for Gruwell’s resolve to bolster her students through self-expression came early that first year when Melvin, one of Sharaud’s enemies, drew an ugly racist caricature of Sharaud. When Sharaud saw the sketch, his lips quivered and his eyes welled with tears. Gruwell snatched it out of his hands, took one look and froze. “It was such a horrific drawing. I realized I had to do something. I said, ‘This reminds me of Nazi propaganda during the Holocaust.’ One student asked, ‘What’s the Holocaust?’ So I asked ‘How many of you have heard of the Holocaust?’ No one had. It was my first teachable moment.”

 She seized on it, asking the teens how many had ever come under fire. Hands went up around the room—shirts, too, as the students displayed war wounds. “I realized at that moment that because my students didn’t know history, they didn’t know they were perpetuating a cycle of violence.” From then on she dispensed with textbooks and brought in books by teens who had lived through racism and war, such as Anne Frank. Then as Anne did, she had her students keep diaries about their own lives.

And write they did. After that first year, Gruwell, now a full-fledged teacher, was assigned to four freshman English classes—150 students in all. Eventually the group compiled their entries into a book. One day, while they were watching a film on the Freedom Riders of the 1960s, someone saw a parallel between that group, who rode buses to fight the injustices of poverty and racism, and the kids in Room 203, writing with the same objective. And so the Freedom Writers were born.

Seredipity then kicked in. Gruwell arranged to have the students travel to Washington, D.C., to present a copy of their book to the Secretary of Education. A friend of Gruwell’s chaperoned the trip and mentioned it to her neighbor, a Los Angeles Times reporter. A lengthy article followed in the Sunday edition, resulting in a TV newsmagazine segment, which led to the students receiving a Spirit of Anne Frank Award from the Anne Frank Center, USA. A Doubleday staffer was on the awards committee, and one year later that publishing house issued The Freedom Writers Diary.

After her Freedom Writers graduated in 1998, Gruwell joined the faculty of California State University, Long Beach. Initially she created a course of study that enabled many of her former students to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees while taking classes together. A few are working toward doctorates. Now Gruwell focuses entirely on the Freedom Writers Foundation, speaking engagements and replicating her original program nationwide—replete with the actual writing exercises. By the end of 2008, some 200 U.S. teachers will have received training in her methods.

And what became of Sharaud? Armed these days not with a weapon but with a B.A. in history, he’s back in the classroom—this time as a teacher in the same school from which he was bounced 15 years ago, right into Ms. G’s Room 203.