“That’s it,” Andrew muttered, dropping the most awful book report he’d ever read onto his desk, “if I read one more stinkin’….”

He trailed off with an aggrieved sigh, glancing at his classroom door. That’s the last thing he needed; some whiney sixth-grader walking in and overhearing him, or worse yet, De Fuher – his overbearing and intrusive principal – walking in and overhearing him herself.

Middle School English teacher, Andrew Slater, covered his face with his hands, ticked off because he was tired; behind on his grading – thanks to a half-finished manuscript shoved in his desk’s top drawer – and just plain ticked off because he was ticked off.
Running a hand through his hair, he addressed the empty classroom, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Teaching had been fun, once. He remembered a time when he thrived off junior high students and their energy, excited to open them up to new literary worlds ripe with wonder, excitement, and imagination.

As time had passed, however, kids were different; parents too, and the damn manuscript was still half finished. Local and State School administration didn’t seem to know what the hell they were doing; instead of teaching Hawthorne, Dickenson, Poe and Twain; he found himself lecturing students to pass ritualistic, standardized tests that meant nothing in the long run, browbeating them with “direct answer prompts”, “writing prompts,” “data based questions,” and then inflating grades to just barely above passing – at the request of his principal, no less – to make their standardized scores look better than the other schools in the local newspapers.

To be honest with himself, those weren’t the real reasons behind his vexation. He had a laundry list of logical reasons for supporting his anger, but essentially, the biggest one was….

“I don’t make a difference anymore,” he whispered, “I mean nothing to them.”

Andrew gazed wearily around his classroom, taking stock in the pale shadows of what had been his love and life, teaching.  It was his free period, but as usual, he’d probably spend most of it putting his room back together; time that would’ve been better spent taking a bite out of piles and piles of horribly and apathetically written essays, thus freeing up more time for his own writing and his still half-finished manuscript. 

He didn’t like to think of himself as anal or meticulous; he aspired to being a novelist, for Pete’s sake – he was supposed to be artsy, free-wheeling, abstract, non-linear, right? – But it always annoyed him that regardless of how many times he lectured, admonished, or gave lunch detention for it, most of his students couldn’t manage to keep their desks in straight rows throughout the course of the day.  They always started the morning nice and straight, but come this hour they sat at odd angles to each other; disjointed puzzle pieces hopelessly scrambled by seventy or so muddle-minded middle school students.
He sighed, reluctantly getting out of his chair. Grim faced, Andrew moved about his classroom, slowly but firmly putting his desks back into order, as if by doing so he could stave off chaos for another day.

Deep in the back of his mind, however, his own voice echoed mockingly, I don’t make a difference anymore. I mean nothing to them.

He’d made a difference, years ago. He’d never won Teacher of the Year or any other awards, but there was a time when he had reasons to teach besides satisfying State Learning Standards and meeting Standardized Learning Quotas. It used to be about the kids; students who’d eat lunch in his classroom and chat about this and that.  Hardy student souls who volunteered to stay after school to edit the school literary journal - which they stopped doing years ago – were excited and grateful when they learned how to write coherent, understandable letters, students who cared.

“Aww, this sucks,” he grumped as he pushed the last desk into place, “I’ve got a job; got tenure…I should just stop complaining.”

Andrew brushed his hands on his pants and sat down with a grunt on a table that used to be a “Book of the Month” display table – back when students cared about those sorts of things – and surveyed the gray, dim shadows of what teaching used to mean.

It didn’t matter much anymore, did it? The job, tenure, all those things – nothing mattered without the spark he once had; the charge he’d gotten from explaining to students what Lois Lowry had been doing with color in The Giver; the thrill of watching them debate over the meaning of the raven in Poe’s chilling poem, The Raven. He’d lost something; where and what was a blur, and he was clueless on how to get it back.
 
 He extracted his red pen – the emblem of his might; the bane of his students’ existence from his shirt pocket and twiddled it. This was the part in the movies when a student from long ago came through the door and thanked him for helping them get to Yale; or when he picked up a newspaper and read the obituary about a former student that died serving in some foreign land, thanks to values he’d instilled.

He grunted, waited a few seconds for that magical moment, twiddling his red pen all the while.

Time passed, and it never happened – because in a world that wasn’t Mr. Holland’s Opus, it rarely ever does.

“I made a difference once,” he whispered again, “a long time ago – I made a difference.”

He wasn’t making a difference now.

The half-finished manuscript ensconced in his top desk drawer burning like a hot sliver under his fingernail, refusing to go away.

Suddenly, in a rare moment of clarity, without any doubt he knew he could do that.
He knew it.

It was maddening; the story was there, he felt it on the surface of the ‘little gray cells’, as Hercule Poroit was always so fond of saying. It was on the proverbial tip of his tongue, but most nights he couldn’t keep his eyes open past nine o’clock, much less do any kind of intelligent writing because he was so tired from grading horrible essays scribbled down by kids who cared less about him coming in to work and teaching them than they did about updating their Myspace or getting the latest Itunes download.

Perhaps even worse was when he did manage to bang something out on his laptop, it usually sounded trite, clichéd, sometimes downright crappy, because whatever literary chops he had left were weakened by another day of duking it out in the academic trenches of junior high.

“I’m not making a difference here,” he said reflectively, tapping his pen on his knee. “I need to make a difference again, somewhere, or…”

He shuddered slightly, not wanting to think about the ‘or’ and what would happen to him if he could never make a difference anywhere ever again.

He needed to make a difference.

A crossroads had been reached; a decision made.

“Forget Mr. Holland and his opus,” he whispered. He stood up and walked briskly to his desk. He stopped, opened the top drawer and grabbed his manuscript, determined to make a difference at last – in the only place he had left.

He grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, pivoted smartly, and exited his classroom for the last time, with piles and piles of crappy book reports lying ungraded on his desk. He headed downstairs quickly to his principal’s office before he lost his nerve.

It was time to make a difference again.