Notes from public school - day 50

I see sacrificial love in my Title I elementary school every day.

Our teachers, admin and staff pour out their hearts for our students every day.

We wake up in the middle of the night wondering how we can make the world a better place for them, wondering how we can help them make the world a better place for all of us.

Our students pour out their hearts for us, too.

They work hard from 7:45 AM to 2:30 PM learning how to do things like write small moments about their lived, how to solve a multiplication problem using the area model, and how to create an experiment to investigate the properties of sound.

I’m so proud of them.

And our students pour out their hearts for each other.

Just today, one of my little students was crying in the lunch line and two of her friends had their arms around her, catching her tears on their shoulders, holding her hurt in their hearts.

Ah, empathy.

In a novel I’m working on, I write about this sacrificial love, this pouring out of the heart.

I call it ancient wisdom at work in the world.

It gives me hope.

Here is a part of that story I’m writing - 

In a place that hadn't been seen by many people, she hadn't been seen by many people, either. 

The Iñuit people know that every snowflake that falls from the sky is different from all the other snowflakes that fall from the sky. No two snowflakes are alike. No two snowflakes have ever been alike. No two snowflakes will ever be alike.

I’m dropping some Iñuit wisdom for you.

The crystals that come together and build the beautiful snowflake are so sensitive to the conditions around them, a wind blowing across the ice or a cloud moving between the sun and the earth or the heartbeat of a whale surfacing in the waters of the Arctic Ocean can change them into something new. 

So Taki's mother and father knew in the beginning that she was unique, that when she was born something new was happening in the world.

This is how they knew.

On the first day of her life, as her mother bundled her in warm blankets in her arms, she made a sound her father had heard only once in his life. 

When he was a boy, her father was roaming across the ice near the edge of the sea, hunting whales with the elders of his village. There, silently by the sea, a bowhead whale rose to breathe out his old, salty breath and breathe in the cold, crisp, clean air of the far north. 

The balaena mysticetus, the bowhead whale, was the subsistence and a symbol for the Iñuit people. Whenever they say it’s name, they whisper it with reverence and awe.

He raised the harpoon to strike the whale, and prayed an ancient prayer taught to him by an old woman...

I think over again my small 

adventures

My fears, those small ones 

that seemed so big

For all the vital things I had 

to get and reach

And yet there is only one great 

thing, the only thing 

To live to see the great day 

that dawns

And the light that fills the 

world

Then he plunged the harpoon into the whale.

Normally, when a bowhead whale is struck by a harpoon, it dives to the depths of the icy water and tries to flea across the sea. It hopes with all it's life to live. 

This whale, though, was not a normal whale. 

As he stood at the edge of the ice and looked into the eyes of the bowhead whale, the whale willingly gave up it's life.

“Did my prayer reach the small, powerful ears of the giant, kind whale?” he wondered. “Is ancient wisdom working in the world again?”

The sound that Taki made on that first day of her life was the same sound the bowhead whale had made as her father looked into it's eyes.

from Trevor’s window - a novel in progress

My county is a farm county, and so I’m the son of a farmer and a child of the deep, rich soil of Clarendon County. 

Most mornings, just before sunrise, I stand sleepily outside our back screen door and see the world brighten around me to a maizy yellow, the color of corn before it fully ripens underneath the husk of a cob growing on a stalk. 

In the evening, just before sunset, I wonder wearily outside that same door and watch the tomato-y sun hang on the horizon, the color of a goliath the day we pick it off the vine. 

The long day in between is filled with cow milking, egg gathering, school going, weed hoeing, lesson learning, and cow milking again. 

The days are good, though, because I have a younger brother named Carver, who, as momma and poppa say, is my pea in the pod. 

He’s my best friend.

Notes from public school - day 49

One of the main characters in a novel I’m writing is drawn from the life of one of my little students from years past from Honduras.

He and all of my students from Mexico, Central America and South America teach me to have listening ears and a big heart.

Here is a small part of that novel - 

Hilcias had small ears. 

Well, they were less than small. 

They were minute. 

He used to be self conscious about them. 

When he stepped into a classroom for the first time his glasses slipped off one of those ears and hung crooked across his face. 

His ears weren't big enough to hold his glasses.

"We come from a family with little ears but big hearts," said his abuelo one day as Hilcias was moping down a row of tomatoes, thinking about the laughter of his classmates. "Good thing you don't talk. You can use your brain for listening. Your ears won't help you out much.”

As he grew older and fell in love with whales, though, he discovered that blue whales, which are the biggest animals to have ever lived on earth, have ears the size of the point of a pencil. 

"The blue whales know how I feel," he thought. 

And that made him feel better.

Hilcias really did have a big heart. 

Literally. 

One day, when he was a toddler, he fell at the end of a row of tomatoes in his abuelo's garden and bruised his ribs on a jagged rock. 

His abuelo and his mami took him to the free medical clinic. 

His abuelo wrapped his arms around him and placed his giant calloused hand on his chest to keep him still. 

He took quick, shallow breaths because if he breathed slowly and deeply his whole body hurt. 

When they looked at the x-ray, Doctor Maria exclaimed, "His ribs are bruised but, my God, look at the size of his heart! I've never seen a heart so big in a child so small!”

An echocardiogram confirmed it, 

"It's rare in children,” said Doctor Maria, "But his heart in enlarged because his heart muscle isn't squeezing well and his heart grew bigger to compensate. 

The good news is, we can treat him. 

He can lead a nearly normal life. 

He'll just have to use his heart in different ways than other folks."

Later, with a book by his bedside, his abuelo said, "I want you to have a listening ears and a big heart, mi nieto. It seems as if nature is helping my wishes come true. 

Don't you worry. 

I'll always love you just the way you are. 

You're perfect to me and for the world."

He kissed him on his forehead.

It comforted him again when he learned that a blue whale has the largest heart on earth. 

It's as big as a Volkswagen Beetle.

"I have a heart like a blue whale," he thought.

And that made him smile.

Peter Ezekiel’s Poem

My child is earth...smooth like a stone...solid like a rock...beautiful like a gem...earth...dancing like earth.

My child is water...meandering like a stream, flowing like a river, crashing like a waterfall...water...dancing like water.

My child is air...drifting like the breeze...blowing like the wind...howling like the whirlwind...air...dancing like air.

My child is fire...smoldering like an ember...burning like a flame...roaring like a blaze...fire...dancing like fire.

My child is dancing.

My child is a dancer.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Ordinary Time, 2019

Liberation Song

we become

the tear 

on the hungry child's cheek,

the callous 

on the old farmer's hand,

the wrinkle 

around the worried mamí’s eye,

the blister 

on the campesino's foot.

- Trevor Scott Barton, poems for a brown eyed girl, 2019

Here

They laid 

cheek to cheek 

beside each other.

They were silent 

for a while. 

The only sound 

was the sound 

of breathing, 

the slow, deep breathing 

that comes 

after the quick, urgent breathing 

of love making.

“Ah, mi cariño," 

she whispered, 

"We are here.”

- Trevor Scott Barton, poems for a brown eyed girl, 2019

Ode to a Migrant Woman’s Feet

Her feet were in the soil,

they were a part of the land, 

held the secrets of the earth, 

knew the mystery of how seed and dirt and water 

become beans in pods,

kernels on ears of corn. 

Her heart was in her feet, 

was in the land, 

was in the mystery itself.

Her feet spoke.

"Estoy aquí.”

“I am here.”

Her feet were 

this word

to the world - 

"I am a person." 

- Trevor Scott Barton, poems for a brown eyed girl, 2019

from Trevor’s window - a novel in progress

Our farm is a classroom for Carver and me.

It’s 160 acres of fields, meadows, trees, and streams to walk over, crawl through, climb up, and swim in. 

We spend as much of our free time as we can exploring and investigating it.

It has a stream running along the back side of our property line. 

We like to stand in it barefooted on summer afternoons and feel the smooth rocks against our heels and the wet sand between our toes. We stand as still as we can and look at the life living just below the surface of the water. 

We talk about all the things we feel, see, and think about.

It gives us all the space in the world to run until the calves of our legs throb and the cheeks on our faces glow.

When we want to see how the little world around us is living or passing on, changing or staying the same, growing or fading away, it gives us all the room we need to walk at our pace asking questions, researching ideas, making hypotheses, doing experiments, and talking about our findings. 

Yep, it gives us our own space, our own room, to be us, to be Carver and Carter.

Notes from public school - day 48

Today, we went on a field trip.

The Junior League of Greenville put on Home Run for Healthy Kids at Fluor Field for schools in Greenville County, and our 4th grade at BES was a part of it.

There were volunteers with booths all around the stadium, teaching kids how to live healthy lives, filling bags with healthy things for kids to take home.

It was wonderful.

My favorite part of the day was when we got to go out onto the baseball field and run around the bases.

My students were so excited. 

“Who’ll be the fastest?” they wondered.

Guess what?

I was!

Not only was I the fastest in my class, but I was also the fastest teacher of the day.

I set the record at 16.5 seconds :)

I love immersion journalism.

A journalist immerses herself or himself into a place among a people at a certain point of time and writes a story through the eyes, hearts, hands, feet and words of “someone who was there.”

I also love immersion teaching.

I try to immerse myself into the shoes of my students and experience the day as they experience it, experience life as they live it.

I am “someone who is there.”

And today I had the fastest feet.

from Trevor’s window - a novel in progress

“What about this one?”

“Which one?”

“This one right here.”

“Oh, that one. I could barely see it. It was hidin'.”

“Well, that’s how nature helps this little one. It can hide so the bird and the wasps cain't hurt it.”

“I have a question for you.”

“Okay. Go ahead. You can ask me.”

“Well, you told me all the ways nature helps protect the caterpillars from the birds and the wasps. But what about shoes? Remember, you said poppa’s boot might accident'ly crush the life out of one of them.”

“That’s a good question, Carter. The answer is the way nature helps these little ones most of all. Come over here and look at this with your eyes.”

I stood beside Carver and we looked at one of the most wondrous things in all of the whole, wide world - the caterpillar wrapped in a chyrsalis waiting to become a butterfly. 

Yes, the chrysalis. 

Did you know the word chrysalis comes from the Greek word 'chrysolos', which means 'gold' in English? 

Most chrysalises have a gold tint in their color, a tint that tells the world something important is happening inside of it, a change is taking place, a metamorphosis is occurring, something completely different will come out from what went in.

“We’re a community,” said my brother, “You and me. 

We wrap ourselves around each other and around the world. Something important is happening inside of us, a change is taking place, a metamorphosis is occurring, and something completely different will come out from what went in.

Because we’re each other’s chrysalises.

Because we have each other.”

Notes from public school - day 47

In our writing workshop today, we worked on turning a small moment from our lives we will always remember into a larger personal narrative  about our lives we would like to share with the world.

I love to read my students’ personal narratives.

Their stories are sometimes funny.

“One day I was playing hide and seek with my brother and when it was his turn to hide, he went to his hiding place, and I just left without trying to find him because he was getting on my nerves.”

I laughed until I cried.

Their stories are sometimes sad.

“My mom died of cancer two years ago. I was swinging in a swing beneath the limbs of the tree in my front yard when my grandma walked out and put her arms around me and told me she was gone.”

I cried.

Their stories are sometimes heroic.

“I came to the United States from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit our island. I try to take care of my mom and do good in school.”

I smiled and raised my fist in the air and yelled out, “Yes!” even though no one was around.

I love to write my personal narrative for my students.

Since I have so many immigrant students in my classroom, I’m writing my story of being an immigrant in Mali in west Africa from 1997 - 2000.

“Another one of my memories of Mali is of the kindness of the people there,” I wrote today. “Mali is a very poor country, so people don’t have many things. But the things they do have, they share. Whenever I visited my friends, they always asked me to sit in their bamboo chair, and it was the only chair they had. I want to be kind like them.”

Later in the day, one of my students from Honduras walked up beside me and said, “Mr. Barton, you are.”

“What?” I asked. “What’cha mean?”

“You’re kind. Like your friends in Mali. Thank you.”

Ah, students.

Ah, stories.

from Trevor’s window - a small story

Life can be full of wonder for caterpillars. 

It can also be full of danger.

My little brother Carver taught me all about caterpillars. 

Late one spring afternoon, we were sitting together under the oak tree in our back yard, a tree we called "Ol' Giant" because it was a humongous tree with two limbs that looked like a giant's arms branching out of a knobby trunk that looked like a giant's knee. 

It was one of the many places that became a laboratory or a classroom that Carver used for researching and teaching.

There were caterpillars everywhere, inching their way over and around "Ol' Giant" and us.

“Look at all these cat'pillers, Carver. There’s no end to 'em.”

“It might look like there’s no end to 'em but they have to be careful 'cause they have pred'tors that are out to hurt 'em an' ev'n kill 'em. 

See that bird settin' on "Ol Giants" arm? 

It's ready to swoop down on one o' these little ones and use it for it’s ev'nin' meal. 

Hear those wasps a buzzin' round the nest at the porch door? 

They’d like to use one o' these little ones for food, too. 

When poppa comes in from the field, his mud caked boots might accidentally step on one of these little ones and crush the life outta it. 

So there’s many things that could put a end to 'em.

But there’s some ways these little ones can protect themselves. 

These ways are amazin', wonderful ways nature gave ‘em to help ‘em. 

Look at this little one. What’s the first thing you notice 'bout it?”

“It’s got bright colors all around it.”

“This little one is a Monarch. Those bright colors tell that bird and those wasps that it’s been eatin' pois'nous plants an' so is pois'nous itself.

Nature makes it tough on the inside so it can be safe on de outside.

How 'bout this one? What you notice 'bout it?”

“Hey, that’s cat'pillar larva. At first I thought it was bird droppins'.”

“These little ones’ll be Tiger Swallowtails. 

Nature he'ps them camouflage themselves so they can stay safe.

What 'bout this one?”

“It has two big circles that look like eyes.”

“Those are called eyespots an' make this little one look bigger an' scarier than it really is. 

Nature he'pd it look like a snake so that bird an' that wasp will leave it alone.

Yep, life is full of danger.

But it’s full of wonder, too.

Notes from public school - day 46

I see so much of myself as a teacher and a writer in this simple farmer/scientist I wrote about from the late 19th century in the American northeast.

I see so much of so many of my little 9 and 10 year olds in him, too.

Here’s to genius in the simple, beauty in the plain and wonder in the ordinary!

Wilson Bentley was born February 9, 1865 on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. Jericho is in the heart of the "snowbelt" and has an annual snowfall of around 120 inches. What a wonderful place to grow up if you love snow. And Willie loved snow!

He liked to net the butterflies that flittered and fluttered around his farm and show them to his older brother, Charlie. He liked to pick the apple blossoms that dotted the apple trees in the pastures and give them to his Mother. But he loved snow more than anything else in the whole world. He loved to see snowflakes on his mittens and on the barn doors but he couldn't share them with anyone. He couldn't save them before they melted.

His mother was his teacher until he was fourteen years old. She had a set of encyclopedias in their house and he read all of them! She gave him an old microscope and he used it to look closely and carefully at all of the amazing things you can find on a farm - flowers, raindrops, and blades of grass. 

Of course, the things he loved to look at most of all were snowflakes. Other children used snow to make snowballs and build snowforts, but he caught single snowflakes and studied them.

He found that snowflakes were beautiful icy crystals and that no two snowflakes that he studied were ever alike. 

He decided to try and draw pictures of snowflakes so he could share their beauty with his community. 

Starting at age fifteen, he tried to draw one hundred snowflakes each winter for three winters. They always melted before he could finish drawing them.

One day, he read an article in a magazine about a camera with its own microscope inside of it. He shared the news with his mother and father and told them that he could photograph snowflakes if he he had that camera. 

When he turned seventeen years old, his parents spent their savings on the camera and gave it to him. They knew he wanted with all of his heart to share what he had seen of snowflakes.

The camera cost as much as his father’s herd of ten cows, but it could magnify a snowflake to 3,600 times it’s actual size. 

During the first winter with his camera, all of his attempts to photograph snowflakes were failures. 

He worked through each and every snowfall but his pictures were only shadows. 

As winter melted into spring, he had no good picture of a snowflake. He waited patiently for the next winter to bring new snow and new possibilities to photograph snowflakes.

When the snowfall began the next year, he tried a new experiment. He used a very small lens opening, which let only a little light reach the negative, but he kept the lens open for up to a minute and a half. 

It worked! 

He had discovered how to photograph snowflakes! 

Now he could share their beauty with everyone.

"My photographs of snowflakes will be my gift to the world," said Willie.

"Snow in Vermont is as common as dirt," laughed his neighbors. "We don't need pictures."

While other farmers with horse and sleigh passed him by, Willie stood by the barn and caught snowflakes on an old black tray. 

He learned that each snowflake begins as a speck, much too tiny to be seen. Little bits - molecules - of water attach to the speck to form its branches. As the crystal grows, the branches come together and trap small quantities of air. Many things affect the way these crystal branches grow. A little more cold, a bit less wind, or a bit more moisture will mean different shaped branches. He realized that was why, in all his pictures, he never found two snowflakes alike.

The conditions around him had to be just right for him to get a good picture of a snowflake. 

He stood for hours on end in his freezing barn for just the right snowflake. If he looked on his tray and found broken snowflakes, he brushed them gently with a turkey feather and sent them down to the frozen ground. 

Some winters he was only able to make a few dozen good pictures. 

The best snowstorm of his life occurred on Valentine's Day in 1928. He made over one hundred photographs during that two day storm.

He came up with creative ways to share his snowflake pictures. 

He gave them away as gifts for birthdays. He held evening slideshows by using a projector and a sheet hung over a clothesline on the lawns of neighboring farms. He sold them to colleges and universities. He gave them to artists to help inspire their own work. He gave speeches about snow. Magazines published his articles and his photographs. Willie the little farmer came to be known as the world's expert on snow. People called him, "the Snowflake Man."

He never grew rich. By 1926 he had spent $15,000 on his work and received $4,000 from the sale of photographs and slides. 

Other scientists raised enough money to allow him to gather up his best photographs and make them into a book. 

When he was sixty-six years old his book - his gift to the world - was published. 

Less than a month after the publication, Willie walked six miles in a blizzard to his farm to take more pictues of snowflakes. 

He became ill with pneumonia and died.

Jericho, Vermont built a monument for him in the. Center of town. The plaque on the monument says - "SNOWFLAKE" BENTLEY: Jericho's world famous snowflake authority.

Snowflake Bentley was a simple farmer and a genius. His words to us are likewise simple and profound - 

"I found that snowflakes were masterpieces of design. No design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted...just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind."