Notes from public school - Day 4

Jose is from Guatemala.

I know this because I pointed out Central America on my classroom world map and he tugged on my shirt and, “Hey, I’m from there. Me and my family are from Guatemala.”

“You are?” I asked. “I’ve always wanted to visit there. Will you teach me about Guatemala this year?”

“Yep,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

I am.

By that I mean in the United States, in South Carolina, in Greenville, in my classroom, and in my heart.

I’m not sure how many times he’s heard those words, “I’m glad you’re here,” but he will hear them many times during this, his fourth grade year.

This afternoon, he gave me a letter, folded up into a little square.

I unfolded it, and this is what I found.

I’m lucky to be his teacher.

Notes from public school - Day 3

I’m reading a book.

This is no easy task for an elementary school teacher.

Since the first day of school on Tuesday, my brain tightly shuts by 8 PM and my eyes by 9 PM.

This book, though, is for my brain AND my heart.

What elementary school teacher (or any kind of teacher) doesn’t need a book for the heart?

A Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle and Muddle of the Ordinary by Brian Doyle is one of those kinds of books.

If anyone finds the miracle and muddle of the ordinary, it’s an elementary school teacher.

Miracle - quiet, thoughtful Danny, an immigrant kid from Mexico, drew and shaded a picture of a bird, an extraordinary picture, while he waited for his bus after school.

He did a # I Wish My Teacher Knew project for me and wrote, “I wish my teacher knew that I love to create.”

“Did you create your picture of the bird from your brain, Danny?” I asked.

“No, Mr. Barton, I created it from my heart,” he smiled.

Miracle.

Muddle - trying to get a class of nine year olds to write a Who, What, When, Where and Why story of their best memory of summer on a deep afternoon on the third day of school.

Muddle.

As I muddled out of my house after school to take out the trash, I miracled a flower on our rose bush.

By ‘miracled’ I mean that I slowed down, looked carefully and listened closely to the flower.

And I was astonished at the beauty in the plain, the genius in the simple, and the wonder in the ordinary of it all.

Thanks Brian.

Thanks Danny.

Thanks public school.

I celebrate you.

for Book Lovers Day, August 9

When I was a little boy, I would carry my blanket with me wherever I would go. it was as if Linus had made his way out of the Peanuts comic strip in the Greenville News and come to live at 2701 East Lee Road in Taylors, S.C. I named my blanket Boo Boo because it was there to soothe me when I fell down onto the asphalt of the road or the concrete of my driveway and scraped my knee, was there to strengthen me if someone said something unkind and I needed the courage to say, “Apologize and take it back,” was there to save me when I woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. In every way it was my security blanket, and I knew I could turn bad things good by just having my Boo Boo beside me.

Now that I’m a grownup, I don’t carry my blanket with me anymore. I still have it, though. It is tattered and torn, weathered and worn, but I can see it with my eyes, feel it with my hands and smell it with my nose, so it remains real to me and has yet to move to the more imaginary parts of the farthest reaches of my memory.

As I look at my blanket, I see the tear from a time I couldn’t find my mom inside of the house. I ran outside the front door toward my elderly neighbor’s house crying at the top of my little lungs, “I can’t find my momma! I can’t find my momma!” I felt the gentle, wrinkled, bony touch of Mrs. Tooke’s hand on my shoulder as she guided me around her plum tree to my fence and whispered, “There she is right there. She’s hanging out the laundry on the clothesline.” I threw my blanket over the fence as if to use it as a rope to climb to my mom and caught it on the barbs along the rim of the steel poles and ripped it right through the middle of it’s soft, cotton face. Mom stitched it up as if she were a doctor stitching up a wayward wound on a broken child.

I run my fingers along those stitches, and feel the scar on my blanket that reminds me of the time it helped me find my lost mom.

After all the years, I faintly smell the clean, comforting smell of the detergent and fabric softener mom used day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year to clean my clothes and my blanket and to say, “I love you,”

Nope, I don’t carry my blanket with me anymore. But I do.

You might be wondering, “Do you still need something like your blanket to help you?”

Yes.

I was thinking about this question the other night as I lay down in my bed and held a book in my hands to read myself into the tender twilight that settles upon us just before we fall asleep.

The book, I Explain A Few Things, was written by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and has one of my favorite parts of a poem inside of it, “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVI” -

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres,

porque de las praderas planetarias

otro estrella no tengo tú repites

la multíplicación del universo.

I love the handful of the earth you are.

Because of it's meadows, vast as a planet,

I have no other star. You are my replica

of the multiplying universe.

As I finished reading the poem, I understood that it is books, the stories inside of books, the poems inside of books, the words inside of books, the books and stories and poems and words of other writers, my own books and stories and poems and words as a writer, that help me turn bad things good.

Before I turned off my light and closed my eyes, I didn’t put Neruda’s book on the floor beside my bed. No, I put it under the covers beside me in the place where my blanket used to be, to soothe, strengthen and save me while I slept,

If you watch me closely, you will see that I carry a book with me wherever I go.

Books have become my blanket.

Books have become my Boo Boo.

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary and courage in the human

Eight of my favorite words are - beauty, plain, genius, simple, wonder, ordinary, courage and human.

I choose eight words because 8 laying down is the symbol for infinity.

They are my infinity words.

I’m creating an encyclopedia with pictures and entries under each word.

Yes, I know. I’m a nerd. But a sincere and lovable one.

These infinity words are filled with simple ideas. 

The ideas are simple like the simplicity of a sunflower. 

A sunflower begins it’s life as a seed in the ground. 

The seed mixes with soil, water, and sunlight and grows up into a plant.

In time, it's face opens to the sun with a face that looks like the sun, a face that is simple and beautiful. 

If you look closely at the face of a sunflower, you will see a simple pattern that is found often in nature, a pattern that nature seems to use as its building block, a pattern that can be graphed by using the Fibonacci sequence, a sequence of numbers that follow the pattern 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21..., a pattern based on the golden ratio, which is found by dividing neighboring  Fibonacci numbers, which gets closer to number 1.62 the farther into infinity you go.

Wow.

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary, and courage in the human

“Teachers are builders,” said my friend. “You build safe learning environments for your students. You build safe spaces for your parents. You build knowledge and experience for yourselves. You build community with each other. You are builders.”

I like her image.

I’m working on the “building community” part.

I’ve been reading Congressman John Lewis’ book “Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change” and reflecting on his experience as a builder in the Civil Rights Movement.

On May 4, 1961, John Lewis and 12 Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C., on a Greyhound bus traveling to New Orleans. 

There were seven black folks and six white folks.

They shared seats with each other on the bus. 

They planned to test a Supreme Court ruling that made segregation in interstate transportation illegal.

They rode safely through Virginia and North Carolina but found trouble when they arrived in my state of South Carolina.

On May 9, 1961, they stopped at the bus station in Rock Hill, S.C. 

Albert Bigelow, Lewis’ seat mate, got off the bus first. 

Lewis followed him.

They were savagely beaten by a violent white mob.

They chose not to press charges against their attackers.

“We simply told them that ours was not a struggle against individuals,” writes Lewis. “It was a struggle against injustice. We got back on the bus and kept pressing on.”

Lewis writes that faith, patience, study, truth, peace, love and reconciliation helped build the civil rights movement and transform the United States.

I’ve been thinking about these tools and wondering how I can use them to build community.

For Lewis, “faith” was knowing deep in his heart that equal rights for all people would overcome white supremacy – no matter the social and political forces that fought against it.

He knew the hammer and nails of this faith would help build up the beloved community, a community freer and more peaceful than the hateful society white supremacy had built.

He was a builder.

As a teacher, “faith” is knowing deep in my heart that kids like James are going to make it.

“I need you, Mr. Barton. I need Mrs. Roberts. I need all my teachers,” he said to me one day as we were walking back from my Response To Intervention reading classroom to his 4th-grade classroom.

He has a great memory and can recall small details from long stories – as long as you are reading those stories to him.

He reads at a first-grade level. 

His spelling is indecipherable.

He struggles to write out what he knows and thinks.

He has me to teach him how to read and write. 

He has Mrs. Roberts to nurture his math, science and social studies skills. 

He needs all of his teachers to see him, love him and use their gifts and talents to help him become all that he can become, to help him make it.

He needs us to be a community for him.

We need him to be a community for us.

It’s the hill we climb.

It’s the community we build.

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary and courage in the human

god

here

i am

barefooted

empty handed, walk

with me, write with me, migrant god

dust on my feet, callous on my hand, is you, god here

- Trevor Scott Barton, ordinary time, 2021

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary and courage in the human

When my little brother Carver was three, we were sitting together under the old apple tree in the far corner of our yard.

- Carver, be very quiet, look very clos’ly, and listen very care’fly, okay?

- ‘Kay!

- What color is the grass?

- Gween!

- Yep!  Do you know what's special about the color green?

- Gween is special?

- Yep, it's special. Look under you. Look out over poppa's fields. Look up in the trees. Green is under our feet. Green is over our heads. Green is all around us. Green is everywhere.

- Gween is evweewheyah.

- Yep.

I put my hands on the ground, pushed my fingers into the soil, and pulled away a patch of grass.

- What is this?

- It's duwt.

- Well, really, it's soil. Poppa taught me the difference between dirt and soil and now I want to teach it to you, okay?

- 'kay.

- The word “dirt” comes from the old, old word “drit”, which means “excrement”. “Excrement” is just a big word that means “poop”.

- Poop!

- Ha! Dirt is the bottom part of the ground. It's used to make a road or a floor.

The word “soil” comes from the old, old words “solium” and “solum”, which mean “seat” and “ground”.

Soil is the top part of the ground. It helps plants grow. It's black and brown. It's made up of helpful things. 

Are you lis’nin’?

- Yep!

- Well, I want you to remember that ev’rybody in the world is like the green grass. We’re all the same. We all have hearts and minds and souls and bodies. No person is better than another. We’re all good and we’re all green on the inside.

- ‘Kay! We’ew aw good and aw gween on th’ inside!

- Yep, but if it’s hot ev’ry day and it don’t rain for weeks and weeks, the grass gets brittle and ugly. Some people are like that on the outside. Life just dries them up and they do ugly things. You gonna’ see them and hear them when we go to town with momma and Poppa. 

They gonna’ tell us that we’re dirt, that we’re only good for being used, that we’re no better’n “poop.” 

Ev’ry time that happ’ns, I want you to remember that we’re not dirt. 

I want you to reach out and hold my hand, and when you feel my hand I want you to remember that we’re soil, that we he’p the earth grow, that we’re good in the world. 

Can you do that? 

Can you hold my hand? 

Can you remember that? 

Can you remember that we’re soil?

Carver reached out his toddling hand to me. 

I took it gently into my own hand. 

We are light. 

We are green. 

We are soil. 

We are.

from trevor’s encyclopedia

from trevor’s encyclopedia of beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary, and courage in the human

My little brother stood quietly beside his desk with a magnifying glass in his hand. 

I looked at him from the splintered frame of our kitchen door where I was standing. 

He turned around slowly, a person deep in thought, and looked at me through the lens of the glass. 

His magnified eye was astonishingly big and brown, as big as the earth and as brown as the turned soil in the fields around our farm.

- Carver, why you up? It’s the middle of the night.

- I cain’t sleep.

- What you doin’?

- I’m studyin’ a tomato.

- Why?

- Did you know tomatoes come from the Andes Mountains 'round Peru in South America? 

And they're fruits and not vegetables 'cause they have seeds inside of them and 'cause they come from a flowering plant? 

And they're good for your heart?

I walked to him and knelt beside him. 

I turned his magnifying glass around and looked into his eye. 

I could see clearly the parts of his eye that I learned at school – the colored iris and the black pupil. 

But it was Carver who clearly saw how these parts work together to help people see.  

- Carter, you know the five senses?

- Yep. Let me think…seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting…umm…and touching. Yep, I know’em.

-Did’ya know if we divided our brains into five parts, a little more than three of those parts would be filled up by seeing?

- Nope, I didn’t know that.

- Yep, there’s a thin layer on the inside of the eyeball. 

It’s the retina. 

Nobody could see into the retina until microscopes came along. 

When people looked inside the retina for the first time they found millions of tiny cells called rods and cones. 

Those rods and cones find rays of light and turn them into signals for optic nerves. 

The optic nerves send these signals to the brain and it turns them into pictures. 

‘Cause of the way lenses work, the picture is upside down. 

The brain turns it right side up. 

Idn’ that amazing?

- Yep, it's amazing. 

And, you know what? 

So are you.

He taught me the parts of the eye that helped him see the world as everyone sees it. 

In that moment, though, deep in the dark of night, I tried to see the parts that I didn’t understand, the parts that woke my brother in the middle of the night to study a tomato while our corner of the world slept, the parts that helped him see the world as only Carver could see it. 

But those parts remained hidden to me. 

I put my arm around his shoulders and held him close.