Mr. Borilla was my fourth and fifth grade teacher. I became a teacher because of him.

Who was the teacher that inspired you to become one too? Does that question inspire you to tell the world a story? If it does, I hope you'll post yours at the Borilla Blog I launched back in 2008.

When I do guest demonstration lessons in elementary classrooms, I begin by telling the students a "Mr. Borilla story." Michael Borilla was my fourth and fifth grade teacher at Bullard Elementary in Fresno, California. He was the first male teacher I had ever had, and he was also the first teacher whose classroom control methods scared me more than just a little. I find that students like to hear about their teachers' own teachers, especially the mean ones.

When Mr. Borilla yelled, he yelled loudly and he got in your face. To this day, I believe his disciplinarian voice could have cut glass. Truth me told, in fourth grade, I needed someone to teach me respect, and Mr. Borilla was there at an ideal time in my development.

And the most important fact about is this: he was one of the best teachers I've ever had. He did things for me that no teacher had ever done, and that no teacher has been able to do since. I became a teacher because of Mr. Borilla.

I had searched for Mr. Borilla's contact information since beginning my website. Not knowing what became of him, I wanted to check in with him, let him know what a difference he'd made to a kid who needed a male role model. Recently, I was contacted by his granddaughter who told me he had passed away in 2005. I was saddened that he'd never heard directly from me about his positive influence on my life, and the continued development of this page is my attempt to let the world know about a great man, since he can't hear from me directly.

In her letter to me after she discovered this page, his granddaughter wrote, "I'm certain that his teaching years, besides his years with his grandchildren, were his fondest years of his life. His passion was to motivate kids with potential to be the best they can possibly be. I'll never forget the look on his face when I told him how much he influenced me, as his grand-daughter. He completely lit up. I'm sure he is thrilled and honored that he had such a positive impact on you and been extremely proud of you and your success."

Having told my stories about him countless times to both teachers and students, I have become aware that every one of us has a story about that teacher who changed us, who affected our lives and probably doesn't even know it. I have set up this page at my website to celebrate the stories we all have about those teachers from our past.

On this page , I share my three favorite stories about Mr. Borilla. I have told and re-told these stories so often over the years that I can no longer be sure which parts of the stories are completely true, and which parts I have dramatized in my attempts to be a better story-teller. True or slightly-fabricated, these stories do what they're supposed to do: they encourage the children I work with to want to become story-tellers too. When I tell these tales, I know Mr. Borilla is still having a positive effect on students. If my stories inspire you to write down a memory about your most influential teacher, please visit my blog--The Borilla Blog--where you can post such memories (in the shape of paragraphs or poems), or read others' contributions.

In March of 2009, I helped coordinate a new inservice class and webpage at the WritingFix website. Both the class and the webpage focused on narrative and memoir writing. We expect to offer this new class anually in Northern Nevada.

Each of us who helped create the class also presented at the class. For my part of the class, I ran a writers workshop, and I had the teacher participants write narrative stories about a favorite teacher from their pasts. I, of course, shared my own stories of Mr. Borilla to inspire the teachers. Along with my own stories, I shared a number of the stories already posted at the Mr. Borilla Project's Blog.

Teachers were all required to post their narratives at the Mr. Borilla Project Blog, and you can read their stories by clicking here.

Three ways to participate:

• Share a story or short memory about the teacher who made the most difference to you by clicking here.
• Share a poem about the teacher who made the most difference by clicking here.
• Did you attend Bullard Elementary too? Share a memory about our school by clicking here.

Mr. Borilla got stuck with me twice.

I was a manipulative little kid when I entered his fourth grade classroom, one who thought I could twist the trust of adults in my life around my sticky fingers. Mike Borilla was the first teacher I had who didn't put up with it, and I fought him for quite some time. He won...of course...but those fights taught me quite a bit about myself.

I needed a person like Mr. Borilla in my life right about the time we ended up together. He could have certainly survived without me as his student, I'm sure, but fate put us together for two straight years.

In fourth grade, I was a devourer of Mad Magazine. I was also a budding class clown. I am sure the two had something to do with each other. Right from the start, Mr. Borilla let me know that he would not be putting up with any of my attempts to be funny on his time. The jokes I told and the cracks he heard me make were quickly stifled. Mr. Borilla had learned to stifle class clowns long before I was born.

Many years after I had left fourth grade, my older brother Bret--who had also been a student of Mr. Borilla--asked me, "Did Mr. Borilla ever give you a shaking?" Unsure of what that meant, I asked for clarification. "You know," Bret said, "where he'd grab your shoulders when he was mad at you and just shake you like crazy." Apparently, when my brother had been his student, this had been a common practice in some classrooms at Bullard Elementary.

Apparently, sometime between my brother's year as his student and my year, there had been some sort of teacher inservice, and shakings became a thing of the past.

When I knew Mr. Borilla, he was famous for his shoutings, not shakings. To show he was angry with one of your--let's say--practical jokes or sarcastic comments, Mr. Borilla would place his face just inches from yours and then he'd let the decibles fly. Loud questions, he'd always just shout a string of loud questions. What were you thinking? Do you think that was funny? What would your mother say if I called her and told her you acted like this? There was no time to answer between his interrogative explosions. You had to just sit there and endure the volume, knowing everyone else was watching the classroom spectacle.

I got shouted at a lot during the first few weeks of fourth grade, which squelched my desire to become the clown in Mr. Borilla's class. I did learn that I could tolerate a shouting longer by tuning him out, by distracting myself with the features of his face. To not hear him, I would start by counting his deep nose pores as soon as he started barking out questions. I would then move to his ears, which had an alarming amount of steel-wool hair growing from them. His salt-and-pepper hair was always perfectly parted on the left side, and despite his head's erratic movements while shouting at me, he never lost that part. Mr. Borilla was a huge, towering man, and to shout at me properly while sitting at my desk, he had to lean over and take a position that must have hurt his back. That back pain probably fueled his fire.

Other than the shoutings, what I remember most about fourth grade was how Mr. Borilla had us do a lot of creative writing. He had a book of clever writing prompts that he mimeographed and passed out weekly. Each prompt was written in a rectangle at the top of the page, and below it were plenty of purple lines on which to write our response. From my seat in the back of the room, I observed my fellow fourth graders often struggling to fill their lines with writing, but I never had much trouble. Mad Magazine, I am almost ashamed to say, gave me the skill to never shy away from creative approaches. Apparently others in my class did not glean the same benefits from the magazines they read, and I started to feel that they resented the fact that creative writing came to me with little effort.

Although it would have been easy for me to spice up my writing with a few jokes, making my stories even better, I didn't. Mr. Borilla's shoutings, all that first September with him, had convinced me that humor had no place in this classroom. It was too bad. Some of those mimeographed prompts would have resulted in such better writing if I had been given permission to be funny. I had to be satisfied being the fastest writer in class, not the fastest and the funniest.

Then in October--in honor of Columbus Day--Mr. Borilla passed out a prompt that begged me to use my sense of humor to respond to it. Pretend you are a ship rat on one of Columbus's ships and tell the story of the explorer's journey. From my seat in the back, I watched my fellow classmates groan as they took this in. Are you kidding me? This had the potential to be one of the funniest ideas ever. Darn you, Mr. Borilla, and your humor-silencing shouts!

I don't know what possessed me that morning. Perhaps humor--too long silenced--just forces its way out eventually. Whatever the reason, I took the risk with that Columbus Day prompt. I started writing, and I let the jokes fly from my pencil. In a ship rat's voice, I made jokes about the food, the living conditions, the sea-sickness, and the lack of flush toilets. The Mad Magazine lover in me found an outlet, and my writing filled the page recklessly.

I giggled as I wrote, and I didn't realize I was doing it. Other students stopped writing, trying to figure out what was amusing me so much over there in my corner of the classroom. I made eye contact with them quickly, then returned to my flow. Take that! Another joke! And here's a pun for good measure. I was on fire with my ship rat story.

Then I noticed his shadow over my paper. He had crept up behind me. I was so ensconced in the work that I had forgotten to keep an eye out for him. My pencil slowed to a crawl as I realized Mr. Borilla was reading what I had been writing, what I had been giggling about. I almost stopped, convinced I could turn around and explain it all as a momentary lapse of judgment, but I never got the chance.

Suddenly my paper was in Mr. Borilla's huge hands, and he was moving towards the front of the classroom with it. He had grabbed it so suddenly that my pencil, still in mid-word, left a huge graphite streak across the page where he'd yanked it away. Mr. Borilla walked slowly to his desk, reading my paper to himself. His huge leather shoes smacked the green linoleum floor with each slow stride he took. The other students smirked at me, at my boldness. We all knew I was about to be humilated, and we all knew I was about to get the grand-daddy of shoutings.

But it never happened. Mr. Borilla got to the front of the room, he spun around with a gleam in his eye, and I'll never forget what he said. "You have to hear this," he announced to everyone but me. "This is so funny." And he read it aloud to the class, doing something magical while he acted out my words. He paused in all the same places I would have paused if I had been reading it. And he stressed all the words I would have stressed. A few sentences in, several classmates started snickering. Then everyone laughed, including him and me. By the time he was done reading, tears stained Mr. Borilla's cheeks, and I'll never forget how that looked. He was the first teacher I ever made cry.

I learned that day that humor on paper can be better received than dumb jokes said aloud. Learning to write became something I suddenly wanted to do. Mr. Borilla had celebrated my words when they found their way to paper. That day, Mr. Borilla made me feel like a writer for the first time. He made me realize that I had a voice that could be heard on paper, and that is a gift I have carried with me ever since.

Mr. Borilla was stuck with me twice . That's right, I had him as a teacher again the next year, when he decided to change grades. Fifth grade was heaven for me, because I had learned to write my jokes onto paper.

I doubt Mr. Borilla had any idea that his simple gesture of sharing my writing aloud changed me as a human being.

Lately, I have been hoping to someday be stuck with Mr. Borilla for a third time--maybe on a plane, or in line at a movie, or in a waiting room somewhere. I'd like to tell him how he changed my life by allowing me to be myself while in school. And how I tried to give that gift to my own students many years later.

Between fourth and fifth grade--my two years with Mr. Borilla as a teacher-- there came a marvelous summer. My best friends all had swimming pools. I learned to body surf with my older brother. And a movie came out that summer that blew my mind. I saw it ten times, at least. It was called Raiders of the Lost Ark. None of us had ever seen a movie like this before.

When summer care to an end, we asked Mr. Borilla if he had seen the film, and he admitted that he had. He also admitted he didn't care much for it.

What? We were shocked. Why Not?

Mr. Borilla said the movie was too long. He didn't want to talk about special effects. He didn't want to talk about amazing characters. To him, it was simply longer than it needed to be. Adventure movies of Mr. Borilla's youth had apparently been much shorter. He called them serials.

I had developed a pretty good rapport with Mr. Borilla by then, so I felt comfortable razzing him when I could tell he was in a mood that allowed for playful razzing. At recess, I remember approaching him one day, saying, "Oh, what do you know? You didn't even like Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"It's not that hard to make an adventure movie, Corbett," Borilla replied. "I mean, what's the definition of an adventure? Something happens. Then something happens. Then something happens. Then something happens. It's not rocket science."

Later that week, perhaps inspired by our conversation, Mr. Borilla announced he was sponsoring a writing contest just for his class. He was calling it The World's Shortest Adventure Story Contest. He obviously expected to prove a point. I was determined to prove my own.

For a week, we talked about adventure story basics. We brainstormed good ideas. He gave the "Something happens, then something happens..." speech a few more times, and we were off and writing.

On the day the stories were due, this is the complete story that I turned in:

The next day, Mr. Borilla handed it back with an appreciative smile. "It's good. Nice and short, but you didn't use enough transition words." In fairness, we had been studying transitional words and phrases, so I re-wrote it once more...just to see if I could get a bigger smile out of my teacher.

I got the smile, but I still didn't win the prize. I don't remember who did win from my class, but I do remember thinking, "That person probably didn't even see Raiders of the Lost Ark!"

Twenty or so years later, I wrote an interactive lesson for the WritingFix website called Make An Adventure. It was partly inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure Series, but partly inspired by Mr. Borilla's contest in fifth grade. When I present this popular lesson as a demonstration lesson, I always tell the students the story you just read.

You can access the lesson and all its resources at the WritingFix website by simply clicking on the book cover at right.

I challenge you to host a World's Shortest Adventure Story Contest with your own students, and post some of the winning stories at the Blog that can be found at the bottom of the left-hand column at the lesson.

Thinking back, I suspect Mr. Borilla had shown up late to a faculty meeting the year I became one of his fifth graders. I suspect someone had volunteered him—in his absence—to be in charge of Bullard Elementary’s Fall Play, because why else would you do that? In fourth grade, my chorus teacher was put in charge of this extra duty expectation at our school, and I saw first-hand what a chore it had been for her; I am sure she went a bit grayer that fall. When she put on “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” I had hoped to be Linus, because he had some good lines, but Matt Shipley got the part because he actually looked like Charlie Brown’s blanket-carrying companion. So I played a member of the chorus who had no name and accepted my first lesson in humility.

Mr. Borilla chose to focus on Halloween for his fall play. He chose that well-known, high-quality piece of drama “The Rosy Cheeked Ghost.” When he personally asked me to audition and told me about the play—it was the story of a school that taught ghosts to be scary, but one ghost had these amiable rosy cheeks—I was sure he was asking me to try-out because he wanted me to star in his production. Had he known I was still bitter about the Linus thing from the year before? We had gotten to know each other pretty well during my fourth grade year, and now that he was my fifth grade teacher, was he helping me overcome the previous year’s drama debacle?

I gave up a day of lunchtime kickball and tried out for Borilla’s play. I read a Dr. Seuss poem I had memorized for a poetry festival, and I nailed that audition. I was horrified to find out that Mr. Borilla gave the part of the Rosy-Cheeked ghost to Fred Dau the next day. I had been cast as the professor who ran the school for ghosts, and I was so angry, I almost quit the play before the first rehearsal even began. I had less than fifteen lines. My time could be better spent playing kickball.

Mr. Borilla had indeed known me, and he knew I was disappointed by his casting. Before I had an opportunity to complain to anyone he took me aside and explained his decision. “The Rosy-Cheeked Ghost is a bigger part, but he’s not that funny. The professor is supposed to be really funny, Corbett, and I know you can do funny. I need you to do funny.”

Turns out I could do funny. At Borilla’s suggestion, I turned the character into a mad scientist type, and I perfected an evil laugh and the crazy rubbing of my hands together, which I still get asked to do by friends today. After the play, students I didn’t know came up to me for weeks and told me I was the character they liked most in the play. I suspect Fred Dau received fewer bits of "stranger praise"; he was a stunning ghost, but no one except his family and friends knew it was Fred beneath the sheet that completely concealed him.

To this day, I still carry the lesson of Bullard Elementary’s fifth grade fall play with me. I know that having the biggest role is not that important. I know that making the most of what you’re given and trusted to do—no matter how big or small—is how one becomes remembered and respected. I’ve taught that lesson to my own students, while directing plays myself and while teaching them about life and writing. Thanks again, Mr. Borilla.

And just for the record, I volunteered to direct those plays. I hardly ever come late to faculty meetings.