Notes From Public School - Day 136

As I tried to be a good teacher and do good teacher things at school today, I was thinking about this small story.

Teaching is ‘heart’ work, ‘blue whales heart’ work, indeed.

Small Story - 

Another thing that you need to know about Hilcias is that he has a big heart. 

Really. 

Literally.

One day he fell at the end of a long row of tomatoes and hurt his ribs on the corner of a big rock. 

His mamí and abuelo took him to see Dr. Maria at the Free Medical Clinic in the evening at the end of the workday. 

His abuelo put a giant, calloused hand on his chest to monitor his breathing and help him keep still. 

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

“Wow!” Dr. Maria exclaimed as they looked at the x-ray with her. 

“His ribs are just bruised, but, my goodness, 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,” explained Dr. Maria, “But his heart is enlarged because his heart muscle isn’t squeezing as well as it should and his heart is growing bigger to compensate. 

The good news is we can treat him so he can lead a nearly normal life. 

He’ll just have to use his heart for something other than professional soccer.”

Later that night, when abuelo was reading a book to him before he fell asleep, he said, “I want you to have a broad mind and a big heart, mi niñocita, and it seems nature is helping my hopes come true.” 

Then his abuelo kissed him on the forehead. 

“Te amo, Hilcias. 

Te amo.”

As Hilcias drifted off to sleep, he remembered that blue whales have the largest hearts that have ever beaten on Earth.

He saw himself walking around in a blue whale’s heart, going through the swinging doors of its ventricles without lowering his head.

This thought comforted him.

“I have a blue whale’s heart,” he thought.

And he did.

Notes From Public School - Day 135

A public school teacher teaches more than the 3 R’s, you know.

We also teach (well, truthfully, we try to teach) our community to be ‘more human.’

What does that phrase ‘more human’ mean, you might ask.

To me, it simply means ‘be kind.’

But that’s not so simple, is it?

Today, a student whispered to me, “Mr. Barton, Fallyn told me to SHUT UP.”

He probably deserved it because he has a history of saying things that needn’t be said.

But I know words are powerful, and I try to teach my students to use them creatively rather than destructively.

So I don’t allow people to say shut up in my classroom.

“No,” I answered, “You wouldn’t do that, would you Fallyn?”

I wish you knew her.

During the very first week of school I said, “Fallyn, I have a word I want to teach you. It’s my word to describe you. It’s the word ‘loquacious.’”

She looked at me with her big, earthy brown eyes.

There was a hint of sadness in them.

“No, no,” I explained, “Loquacious means you talk a lot. And, you know what? It’s a character trait of yours that I love in you. I’m glad you talk a lot because you have a lot to say. You, my student, are a loquacious genius. I’m glad you’re in my classroom.”

That moment set the tone for the whole school year.

She’s been being the best person and doing the best work she can each moment of each day.

Now, she looked at me with her big, earthy brown eyes again.

And, again, there was a hint of sadness in them.

“Fallyn,” I asked with my watery blue eyes (my blue eyes have become watery these past 14 years of teaching, like my grandpa’s eyes after he’d farmed the earth for many years), “You didn’t tell him to shut up, did you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Fallyn, in this classroom, we NEVER tell anyone to shut up. We use words to build up instead of tear down. We are kind to each other.”

“I’m sorry,” she said to the student she’d yelled at.

A few minutes later, she was working with that same student in a break out room.

Do you know what that is?

It’s a series of puzzles students have to solve on their Chromebooks by reading information and following clues.

The puzzles can be quite hard.

Usuallly, students have to work together to solve them.

Fallyn broke out into a big smile.

“We did it, Mr. Barton!”

Then she looked at the student beside her. “You’re a genius child,” she told him.

He broke out into a big smile.

I did, to, because in that small moment

our classroom (and therefore the world) became a more human place.

Notes From Public School - Day 134

I discovered something amazing.

I want to tell you about it, as the storyteller in me is apt to do.

I discovered a precept.

You know that word, don’t you?

Webster’s Dictionary defines it as a ‘principle intended especially as a rule of action.’

I said it again and again and tried to do it again and again on this first day back to teaching after spring break.

 

I will say and do it again and again tomorrow.

And every day for the rest of my teaching and writing career.

It goes like this -

Always leave people better than you found them.

Hug the hurt.

Kiss the broken.

Befriend the lost.

Love the lonely.

Every day, I hope to bring a bit of beauty, genius, wonder and courage to my home, my school, my community, my state, my country and my world.

This precept will help me do just that.

Left Foot Poems

Trevor Scott Barton

Left Foot Poems 

Here is my first published chapbook of poems!

There are 40 poems in around 100 pages in the book.

In the poems, I look and listen for beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary and courage in the human.

The book is small enough to fit in your back pocket, but the poems are big enough to fill the whole, wide world.

For $15.00, I’ll hand deliver or send a signed copy of the book to you.

I’ll also write a personalized poem for you.

You can give me a topic, and I’ll work hard to make it into word art.

Please send your request to my e-mail address - trevorscottbarton@gmail.com.

I’ll be happy to send your signed book and personalized poem to you through the USPS.

If you’d like to pay electronically, you can send the $15.00 through PayPal @juniperzine or through Venmo @teachandwrite

If you’d rather pay by check, you can send it to me through the mail -

Trevor Scott Barton

16 Don Drive

Greenville, SC 29607

You do not have to pay until you have the book in your hand.

Thank you for supporting indie writers and local art!

In good friendship and with a tender heart,

Trevor

(auribus cordis audis - listen with the ears of the heart)

the little monk

 “The little monk knows there are wrinkles of kindness that come from years of loving and hoping, the kind that come when you cradle a baby in your arms and rock her deep into the night, the kind that come when you study the small, quiet things in the world and see and hear beauty in them.”

“The little monk hopes in his own heart that a new day will come when the laws of God’s heart take the place of the laws of people’s hearts and the bus will stop and open its doors and welcome EVERYONE on board.”

“The little monk knows a blue whale’s heart is as big as a Volkswagen Beetle, and that it must feel love deeply and widely because it is so deep and wide.”

- Trevor Scott Barton, “The Little Monk,” 2022

from trevor’s encyclopedia of lost things

Taki’s aakaga and aapaga planned to name her after her aanaruaga, whose name was Asiavik.

Asiavik is the Iñuit word for the Alpine blueberry, a hearty berry that grows over the Arctic tundra and provides food from the time of its harvest til deep winter, where they can be frozen and preserved for good use.

Asiavik was beautiful, helpful and always there when you needed her, like the berry for which she was named.

The week before Taki was born, Asiavik died.

A strong, healthy heart has two billion heartbeats to give to the world.

The heartbeats Asiavik gave made the world a more beautiful, ingenious, wonderful and courageous place.

In the Iñuit way, when people die, their names are given to the next babies born into their families.

In this way, the loved ones can live again among the people.

Their beauty, ingenuity and wonder can grow in the new person.

Yes, Taki was to be named Asiavik.

Her parents changed their minds, however, when she whistled the song of the bowhead whale from her aapaga’s memory.

“Her name is Taklaingiq,” they announced as they introduced her to Point Hope.

“What!?” asked the people as they whispered among themselves.

“How could they not name her after her aanaruaga?

Why would they not welcome Asiavik back among the people?”

No one asked these questions out loud, though.

The Iñuit people are polite and thoughtful and do not question the motives of others.

They wondered silently.

What might become of the baby?

Would she be broken because her parents broke the old ways of the Iñuit?

Her parents never answered the unspoken questions or addressed the concerns of the village.

They simply let her name stand as it was.

Taklaingiq.

In the ancient, sacred language of the Iñuit people, it meant “one who must not be mentioned.” In the ancient, sacred language, it was the word for the bowhead whale.

That is what she would become.

Like the bowhead whale.

Life for the people.

Life for the world.

They would call her Taki.

for the quiet ones (World Poetry Day 2022)

Hilcias studied the yellowing eye chart on the back of the door of the examination room at the Barrier Island Free Medical Clinic.

He practiced saying the letters in his mind, from English to Spanish, from Spanish back to English, again and again until he could think them in a seamless line.

His mamí flipped through the pages of an old Life Magazine with an immigrant mother and child on the cover.

His abuelo stared at a watercolor painting of a heavy laden peach tree, the colors of the ripe peaches glowing brightly against the white walls of the room.

He clasped his hands in his lap and looked thoughtfully into them as if he were looking into the deepest parts of the earth.

There was a tap on the door.

A young doctor walked into the room.

“Buenos Dias, mi amigos,” she said. “Me llamo Maria. Como estas ustedes?”

She had eyes like his abuelo, deep and earthy brown.

She wore a white doctor’s coat, faded blue jeans and an old pair of black Converse Chuck Taylor All Star hi-top tennis shoes.

“Well,” she began, “Let’s talk about Hilcias.

We looked over his brain scans and studied them very carefully. 

We didn’t find any organic reason why he doesn’t speak. 

The other tests on his ears, nose and throat came back normal, too. 

So all of the parts that help him speak are well and good inside of him.”

His mamí put her arm around his shoulder, held him close, and breathed out a long, slow, quiet sigh of relief.

“But we still haven’t answered THE question,” continued Dr. Maria. 

“Why doesn’t Hilcias speak?”

She pulled up a chair in front of him, sat down, and leaned her face close to his face until her nose gently brushed against his nose.

“We’ve got to walk together down paths into places we’ve never been,” she smiled. 

“The only person who can tell us why he’s not speaking…is not speaking.”

He smiled back at her.

He looked away from her eyes and down at her feet.

Suddenly, he whistled the most beautiful notes Dr. Maria had ever heard in her life.

They reminded her of the joy she felt as a little girl standing in the fields with her family on their farm in El Salvador.

At the same time, they reminded her of the sadness she felt as she worked day after day to help person after person who was just trying to make a better life for their families in places where it was hard to live.

The music brought a stillness and a quietness to the room.

After a moment, his abuelo spoke.

“He does speak, but not many people understand him, I think.”

And it was true.

- Trevor Scott Barton, poems for a brown-eyed girls, 2022

Lantern

Taki lived beside the whale bone arch at the edge of the Chukchi Sea in Point Hope, Alaska.

The arch is made of two bowhead whale jaw bones planted in the ground, forming a gateway from the land to the water and from the water back to the land.

It whispers quietly to the world, "The Balaenidae mysticetus gives its life to the Iñuit people, and they give their lives back to the bowhead whale."

“Give,” it says.

Her house was made of yellow wooden slats and a red tin roof.

It had four windows.

There was one for each side of the house.

She could see to the north, south, east and west of the Arctic land and sea.

A little chimney rose slightly above the roof's ridge.

Smoke from the evening fire swirled ever so gently into the night.

It thinned itself up and out into the star filled sky.

She sat by the fire in the front room, warming herself against the long night of the deep Arctic winter.

She looked out over the Chukchi Sea.

The water was calm.

Stars reflected off of it like little lights.

Ice floes moved slowly with the tide.

Whales sang to each other.

"Small spaces," she thought, "hold the world together.”

She saw a boy standing under the whale bone arch.

 

The wind blew off the icy sea and whipped his brown face until he looked as if he might become a part of the sand, salt and sea.

 

His shirt and coat weren't enough to protect him from the cold, and the skin of his cheeks and the water in his eyes froze with the sunset.

 

"He looks so small against the sea and the sky," she thought.

Small things struggled to survive around the Chukchi Sea, she knew.

 

Her heart was big and warm.

This helped her live in that cold, icy place.

 

Her kind eyes were as brown as the earth beneath the snow.

This helped her see in that fierce, white land.

 

"I know his heart is big and warm, too," she thought.

She took a lantern out of the window and headed out into the night to guide him in.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Poems For Brown-Eyed Girls, 2022

like rain that falls softly and tenderly

It was a rainy morning in the old city.

He looked out the window and saw dark clouds rolling in from the sea. 

He felt the cool breeze across his naked body. 

He turned quietly and watched her sleeping. 

The sheet rose and fell with each of her breaths. 

He was thankful she was finally resting. 

“Is she dreaming of time, or place, or the sea, or me?” he wondered.

Yesterday, they thought they’d never see the light of a new day. 

There was a cut across her cheek and a rip in her jeans as they had struggled hand in hand across the countryside. 

They had arrived at the hotel in the night. 

He had taken off her tattered clothes and had washed the blood, sweat, tears and dust from her body.

She had done the same for him. 

He had remembered the look of fearlessness and hopefulness in her eyes as they had journeyed over the land together.

That memory comforted him now as she slept.

He laid down beside her. 

The curves of her body reminded him of the gently rolling hills below the mountains where he lived as a boy. 

She was beautiful like that land, like the yellow flowers he found as he roamed the countryside, like the soil he walked over barefooted as his grandfather turned the earth with donkey and plow, like the leaves of the trees that sparkled green after the rains of the rainy season. 

He moved close to her until he felt her breath across his neck and her heartbeat upon his chest. 

He closed his eyes.

She sighed and began to stir. 

Tomás,” she whispered as she opened her eyes. 

“Mi mariposa hermosa,” he answered. 

“Estoy aqui, estoy aqui.” 

Though their bodies had been broken by the revolution, they made love to each other like the rain that fell softly and tenderly out the window on the city of Havana.

- Trevor Scott Barton, poems for a brown-eyed girl, 2022

Tenderness

Simple kindness. 

He remembered when he was a young man. 

He sat at the foot of his bed. 

Gabby stood before him.

She lowered her dress to the ground. 

He saw her naked for the first time. 

He looked at her smile, her sonrisa, and it was as if the sun had risen on him. 

He looked at her brown skin, and it was as if the rich soil of the countryside had opened itself to him. 

He looked at her body and couldn’t breathe for a moment for it was as if all of the beauty of the world had fallen on him. 

They didn’t speak, only held each other with tender solicitude. 

Simple kindness.

- Trevor Scott Barton, Poems for a Brown Eyed Girl, 2022

Sunrise

I walked with my abuelo across the fIelds of tomatoes.

Our skin was wrinkled and worn ike weathered pairs of leather shoes. 

We worked the land, bent down over new plants, built up soil around their stems, tenderly told them we were there to help them grow into tomatoes, tenderly told them we were there.

“Nosotros estamos aquí, nosotros estamos aquí,” we sang to the plants at sunrise.

We walked and worked, worked and walked until our feet took on the red color of the soil.

We knelt over the last plant in one of the never ending rows.

It was smaller and weaker than the rest of the plants, for reasons we did not know.

“Maybe it’s because it didn’t get enough nutrients or sunlight or water to help it grow and thrive,” I said, “But only enough to help it barely live.”

We didn’t take the small, weak plant into our hands and tear it out of the ground and toss it aside because of it’s smallness and weakness. 

No, we didn’t do that. 

Instead, we caressed the little plant.

We patted extra soil around it.

We sang gently to it in Spanish, “ Ah, amiguita, pedacito de nuestro corazón, te atenderemos, te cuidaremos, te ayudaremos a vivir y crecer,.” (Ah, little friend, little part of our hearts, we will tend you, we will care for you, we will help you live and grow.)

We looked closely at the little plant, so closely the sweat on our foreheads dripped onto the ground around it like soft rain.

We listened carefully to the little plant, so carefully the beat of our hearts moved the little leaves of the plant gently, ever do gently, like the morning breeze.

Our amiguita went on to grow the most beautiful, wondrous tomato we’d ever see and taste in our lives.

We saved its seeds and planted them again and again, season after season, until we shared the fruits with a thousand neighbors who became a thousand friends.

Trevor Scott Barton, Brown Eyed Stories, 2022

Left Foot Poems

Trevor Scott Barton

Left Foot Poems

auribus cordis audis

Here is my first published chapbook of poems!

There are 40 poems in around 100 pages in the book.

In the poems, I look and listen for beauty in the plain, genius in the simple, wonder in the ordinary and courage in the human.

The book is small enough to fit in your back pocket, but the poems are big enough to fill the whole, wide world.

For a donation of $15.00, I’ll send a signed copy of the book to you.

I’ll also write and send a personalized poem for you, too.

You can give me a topic, and I’ll work to transform it into word art.

Please send your request to trevorscottbarton@gmail.com.

I’ll send your signed book and personalized poem through the USPS.

If you use Venmo or PayPal, you can pay electronically.

If you’d rather pay by check, you can send it to me in the mail.

You don’t have to pay until you have the book in hand.

In friendship and with a tender heart,

T

Notes from Public School - Day 132

We had ‘weather day’ in 4th grade last Thursday.

My room was the Snowflake Bentley/create a snow crystal room.

Do you know about Snowflake Bentley?

I see so much of myself as a teacher/writer in this simple farmer/scientist.

 I wrote about him for the Greenville Journal.

The Greenville County Public Library told me they checked out their books about/by him over and over again because so many people were inspired by his life and work.

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

Snowflake Bentley

Wilson Bentley was born February 9, 1865 on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. 

Jericho is in the heart of the ‘snowbelt.’

It has an annual snowfall of around 120 inches! 

What a wonderful place to grow up if you love snow. 

Willie sure ‘nough 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 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.

He caught single snowflakes and studied them.

He found that snowflakes were beautiful icy crystals.

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 had that camera. 

When he turned seventeen years old, his parents spent their life savings on that camera and gave it to him as a gift.

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 cows, but it could magnify a snowflake to 3,600 times its 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 of snow.”

Indeed, other farmers with horses and sleighs 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 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. 

Free 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 birthday presents.

He showed them during 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 them. 

Magazines published his articles and his photographs. 

Willie the little farmer came to be known as the world's snow genius. 

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 this 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 got sick 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 likewise are 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."

His life and work remind us to put our hearts into who we are and what we do, to give ourselves and our work as gifts to the world, and to leave a record of beauty that will make the world a more human place for all of us.

¡Muchas Gracias Snowflake Bentley!

Notes from Public School - Day 131

I dedicate this small story to my 9 and 10 year olds from Mexico, Central America and South America.

I try to show and tell them every day, “I am here. Estoy aquí.”

from trevor’s encyclopedia of lost things

(from Dr. Maria's notebook)

The road from the countryside of El Salvador to the lowcountry of South Carolina is long and difficult.

If you take time to ask migrants along that road, "Why are you trying to make it to the United States?" they will answer, "We're trying to make una vida mejor, a better life."

The journey is fraught with danger and heartbreak.

Listen to these words from journalist Oscar Martines, who embedded himself with migrants on the migratory trail from Central America to the Mexican-United States border and wrote about the people he met in his book The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail.

"We walk on, telling ourselves that if we get attacked, we get attacked. There's nothing we can do. The suffering that the migrants endure on the trail doesn't heal quickly. Migrants don't just die, they're not just maimed or shot or hacked to death. The scars on their journey don't only mark their bodies. They run deeper than that. Living in such fear leaves something inside them, a trace and a swelling that grabs hold of their thoughts and cycles through their heads over and over. It takes at least a month of travel to reach Mexico's northern border...Who takes care of them? Who works to heal their wounds?"

Before The Beast was translated into English, it was titled Los Migrantes Que No Importan, The Migrants Who Don't Matter.

It is important to remember that people do not leave their land, their family, unless they have to.

If your children are threatened by violence, sickness or poverty, you migrate and look for una vida mejor for them.

If your house is bombed and your land is stolen from you, you migrate and look for una vida mejor.

If you open your cupboard, and there is nothing but dust, and you reach into your pockets and there is nothing but lint, and there is no sustaining work for you to do to support your family, but only underemployment and unemployment, you migrate and look for una vida mejor.

No, no one wants to leave their land, their family, unless they have to.

No one wants to take on the danger and the heartbreak unless they have to.

But some people have to.

Hilcias, his mamí and his abuelo had to.

They do matter.

They are human beings.

They are life.

I am here to take care of them. 

I am here to heal their wounds.

I am here.

Estoy aquí.