About the Author: Arthur McShain
Arthur McShain has a B.A. from Erskine College, SC, and M. Ed. from Georgia State University. He lives and teaches secondary school in Greenville, South Carolina. He has written five screenplays, including a biopic on the life of Walt Disney, "Dreamers of the Day". He enjoys producing short films and documentaries on any person or organization with a story to tell.
This teacher walks into a school…
Public school, unfiltered, and the gloves come off...
Raw neophyte teacher Dale Barrow embarks on a Gatsby-ish romp into the purgatory of the burlesque – deep south’s Decadia Heights High School in the 1980’s, where he deciphers matted policies, navigates an emerging and mysterious “intercommunication” technology, and befriends eccentric colleagues and Gulmer, a handicapped cohort. Gradually, Barrow finds himself adrift in a fragile liaison with a beautiful senior student, Angelea, and caught in the orb of a sinister scheme to eliminate another teacher.
He must defuse it all or lose his fortunes, but not before he finds himself being censured by authorities for his use of dancing and music in his classroom and being told “Your kids aren’t learning anything”. Barrow, on the cusp of an abrupt exit, is convinced by Angelea to stay at the Heights. He progresses forward, delicately tethered to a childhood friendship and sustained by visits with his demented mother, a doting Aunt, and immersion in the hijinks and pratfalls of colleagues.
He can't take it anymore...
He has been crippled by a gang attack on his class, and had a collapsing episode with Angelea. Now, on the last day, he and Gullmer break through a classroom door to foil a murder attempt on an unpopular teacher. The deep void in his life and the pressures of a trial prompt him to execute his final escape north to live with his sister in Boston.
Boston is the perfect revolutionary oasis. Family, friends, and reconnects with his past help him find the solace and direction to reconstruct his heart, unite with his one true love, and return to teaching. It was “all about her”….
As if on a skiff on gentle waters, out of bay we go, where we were made for, Mozartian, a song, a wraith banished, a moment in eternity compressed…
Death of a Teacher narrative
