For her first day of teaching English, Erin Gruwell put on her polka-dot dress and pearls, carried her Coach purse out to her sporty convertible and took her perky attitude to Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif., where she was confronted with a class of students who segregated themselves by race, mostly didn’t like reading and disdained her white suburban privilege.

So a once-naive California idealist was supposed to motivate Fort Worth teachers to strive for excellence in the new school year?

Gruwell’s students included teens who’d belonged to gangs, who’d watched friends slain by gunfire and knives, who’d been in juvenile detention, who’d performed poorly in school, who’d been abused or watched their mothers beaten. Feeling that teachers and parents had given up on them, many had given up on themselves.

When an ugly racist caricature circulated through the class, Gruwell erupted, ranting about the Holocaust. When it became evident that her students hadn’t even heard of that horrible historical blight, she tore up her curriculum and replaced the freshman literary canon with “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” and “Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo.”

So an obsessed iconoclast was supposed to inspire Fort Worth teachers to find creative ways to reach students regardless of race, ethnicity, background or family circumstances?

Exactly. And she didn’t disappoint.

Through other teenagers’ writings about the Holocaust and the Bosnian war, Gruwell helped her students see the folly and destructiveness of intolerance, the senselessness of violence. They drew parallels to their own troubled neighborhoods, to their own prejudices and attitudes. She got these students – tough, quiet, timid, belligerent, intimidating and intimidated – to think, to talk. And then to write.

They wrote about living in their own undeclared war zones, about coping with their own insecurities, about their angers, their fears, their shames. And their hopes.

They described sexual degradation in shocking detail. They poured out their frustrations without sparing the vulgarity. They recounted family breakups and homeless wandering and violent episodes that no child – not even a high schooler – should have to navigate.

And then they graduated – all 150 of her students, an effusive Gruwell told thousands of Fort Worth teachers assembled at the Wilkerson-Greines Activity Center last week for the equivalent of a pre-semester pep rally.

She tugged heartstrings and set tears flowing as she recounted how students who’d been written off by others discovered the power of writing as an instrument of change.

Gruwell’s unorthodox odyssey with her students included visits with Miep Gies, the woman who harbored Anne Frank’s family from the Nazis during World War II, and Zlata Filipovic, a Bosnian teen whose diary chronicled the war that wrenched her country. A wealthy California businessman donated computers for Gruwell’s classroom.

Having learned about the Freedom Riders – blacks and whites who rode buses together to fight segregation in the South – the students called themselves the Freedom Writers and set about to promote tolerance and understanding. They published their essays in a book whose sales have helped pay for their college education.

Gosh, it sounds like the recipe for a movie.

And it’s being made into one, starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank and directed by Richard LaGravenese. Producers include Michael Shamberg and comic Danny DeVito, who both also did “Erin Brockovich,” plus Nan Morales, who worked on “Coach Carter.”

Gruwell left the high school classroom to spend several years teaching aspiring teachers and now takes the Freedom Writers model across the country, encouraging teachers to share their enthusiasm, to see potential in all their students, to find ways of rousing the unreachable, to “do the right thing.”

“Our hope is, kids right here are going to say … ‘maybe all I have to do is listen to this caring adult who stands before me every day and believes in me,’ ” she said.

Anyone who cares about teenagers should read “The Freedom Writers Diary.”

I can’t wait to see the movie.