More importantly, he was one of the best teachers I've ever had. He did thin gs 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.
Using the Internet, I have searched for Mr. Borilla many times, but to no avail. I am unsure what ever became of him, just as I am sure he is unaware what became of me. If you know where he is, tell him to contact me. I'd like to know what he thinks of the stories I have told and written about him, and I'd like him to know that he inspired me to become a teacher who valued writing above everything else.
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 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 stories, I know Mr. Borilla is still having a positive effect on students.
Here, I will also provide space for users of this website to share a story about the teacher who changed them the most. Send me your stories (Corbett@CorbettHarrison.com) along with a photo of your teacher--if you have one-- and together we'll turn this page into a place to celebrate the best teachers of our lives. |
 Mr. Borilla was stuck with me twice.
I was a manipulative little kid when I entered his fourth grade classroom, one who thought I could twist adults in my life around my grubby little fingers. Mike Borilla was the first teacher I had who didn't put up with it, and I fought him baby tooth and nail. He won...of course.
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 kids 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 a mandatory 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 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 has 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 laughing. 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 years later. |
Three ways to participate in this project:
Share a one paragraph blurb about the teacher who made the most difference by clicking here.
Share an original narrative about the teacher who made the most difference by clicking here. Contributors will have their names entered into a monthly drawing for a free classroom resource from the Northern Nevada Writing Project.
Share an original poem about the teacher who made the most difference by clicking here. Contributors will have their names entered into a monthly drawing for a free classroom resource from the Northern Nevada Writing Project.
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Between fourth and fifth grade--my two years with Mr. Borilla as my teacher--, there came a marvelous summer. My best friends all had swimming pools. I learned to body surf with my older borther. 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.
We asked Mr. Borilla if he had seen the film when summer came to an end, and he admitted 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 too long. Adventure movies of Mr. Borilla's youth had apparently been much shorter. I believe 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 hard to make an adventure movie, Corbett," Borilla replied. "I mean, what's the definition of an adventure story? 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 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 World's Shortest Adventure
by Corbett Harison
_______Something happened. Something happened. Something happened. Something happened. Something happened. Something happened. Something happened. And something happened.
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.
The World's Shortest Adventure
by Corbett Harison
_______First, something happened, and then something else happened. When something happened later, something happened after that too. Something happened right before something happened. Finally, something happened. And something happened to finish it all.
 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 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. |
A new Mr. Borilla story under construction.
