Notes from public school - day 53

As a teacher, I’m trying to help my students become people who use their ingenuity to build a better world for everyone.

I’m trying to help them become something beautiful for the world.

I’m trying to help them become filled with wonder.

I’m trying to help them become.

The truth is, they are helping me become, too.

Every time I help a student write a sentence that expresses exactly what she wanted to say, I think, “Hey, I just used my gifts as a writer to make the world a little clearer, a little better.”

Every time I smile my biggest smile for a student and give him a fist bump and say, “I’m glad you’re here. I’m here for you,” I think, “Hey, I just played a small part in making a beautiful moment in this big world.”

Every time I exclaim, “A blue whale’s heart is so big, you, my students, could walk around in it!” I think, “That light I see in their eyes is the presence of wonder in their lives.”

Here is a poem I wrote about becoming. It’s who I want to be...it’s what I hope to do...in the world.

                               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

Notes from public school - day 52

There is a great video from RSA Shorts (Espresso for the mind) that features the wonderful Brené Brown teaching about empathy.

Watch it if you can.

I’ve been thinking about empathy today.

Just after the morning bell rang at 8 a.m., my friend and Spanish translator from the front office knocked on my classroom door.

“You have a new student!” he said enthusiastically.

Before me stood a 9 year old and her Mom.

“Muy bien,” I smiled. “Bienvenito!”

She’s from Honduras.

In that moment, I wondered what it would be like to be standing in her shoes.

New day, new country, new school.

As I led her to her new seat, I said what Brené Brown taught me to say in that video.

Not “You’re going to love it here!”

Not “Everything is going to be okay!”

But simply, “Me alegra que estes aquí. Estoy aquí para tí.”

“I’m glad you’re here. I’m here for you.”

from Trevor’s window - a novel in progress

As I've already told you, my poppa is a farmer. 

I"m looking out the window, the same window Momma and I looked out of to see the winter snow, and see him kneeling in our garden, planting the plants. His skin is the color of newly plowed rows. Sweat is dripping off of his forehead and mixing with the sun and soil, nourishing the seeds so they can grow. When he comes into the house, he'll smell of the humble smell of dirt.

His heart is faithful and soft. It's like a big, beautiful Better Boy tomato swaying quietly in the whispering winds of our southern, summer skies.

His soul is bright and gentle, like a yellow ear of sweet corn wrapping itself gently in tender husks, protecting itself from the searing sun, woolly worms, and harshness of life.

His mind is persistent and broad, like an engine running a plow, working through problems, fixing anything, accepting me, and allowing me to grow as the land accepts the seed and allows it to grow.

His strength is helping and enduring, like the Farmall tractor we borrow from a white neighbor, a tractor that keeps him from struggling behind a mule and a plow.

Yep, he's a farmer, a person of the land, and he's my favorite farmer. 

Just as he sows the seed and gathers our garden every year, so he sows faith, hope, and love into mine and Carver's hearts, souls, minds, and strengths and gathers us to himself.

One thing he's not, though, is a person of great education. As a matter of fact, I'm in the fifth grade and I've already gone past him in formal schooling. But he's a person of great faith. 

Every Sunday morning, after the chores are done and we eat our breakfast, poppa, Carver and I put on our best overalls and momma puts on her pretty dress and we go to church. 

It's there, listening to the sweet singing of the choir and the poetic preaching of the preacher, that Daddy finds Jesus, the Jesus who wants to free black folks from being hurt by white folks and white folks from hurting black folks, the Jesus who wants him to work to make the world a better place for black folks and white folks, the Jesus who wants him to know good things and do good things. 

It's there, in church, that he learns about wonder, that wonder is the root that helps knowledge grow. 

It's there where he learns how to wonder. 

It's there where we all learn how to wonder.

from Trevor’s window - novel in progress

from Trevor’s window - a novel in progress 

His abuela’s name was Izote. 

The izote is the national flower of El Salvador. It is white and fragrant, with thick pointed leaves. It is born again out of it’s own injured trunk...it never dies. It is a stubborn flower full of a will to live.

She was like the izote in so many ways.

She was beautiful and stubborn. 

In one way, though, she was not like the izote.

She had not been able to be born again out of the wound of El Salvador’s civil war.

She had simply and terribly disappeared, like so many poor people from so many places across the farms and fields of the wounded land.

Hilcias never met her, but he knew her from the stories his abuelo and mamí told him about her along the migratory road.

His mamí wore him on her back with a tattered piece of cloth as she trudged the rows of tomatoes and peaches along the South Carolina coast. 

He felt the heat that weighed on her shoulders. 

He saw the dirt and blisters on her feet as she walked on and on, picking and bending, bending and picking, until the sun set on the horizon. 

He listened to this song she sang about his abuela, Milanga del Fusilado, The Ballad of the Forgotten.

No me pregunten quién soy

ni si me habían conocido

los sueños que había querido

crecerán aunque no estoy.

Ya no vivo pero voy

en lo que andaba soñando

y otros que siguen peleando

harán nacer otras rosas

en el nombre de esas cosas

todos me estarán nombrando.

(Don’t ask who I am 

Or if you knew me 

The dreams I held dear 

Continue without me.

My life is finished but I carry on

in those who still dream

and  struggle. They will grow new flowers 

And in the name of those

I too will be named.)

He came to know her through his mamí’s heart, his mamí’s feet and his mamí’s music.

What a beautiful way to get to know another person.

His abuelo would sit beside his sleeping mat each night and tell him stories about El Salvador and his abuela. 

“The land was beautiful,” he said, “With green fields on the mountain that stretched as far as your eyes could see. They stretched all the way to the river that was as blue and crisp as the morning sky. 

We were happy there. The land was ours to use, the land was ours to nurture. The corn, the beans and the mangoes were ours to eat and sell and store away for the dry season.

Your abuela was so beautiful standing in those fields. I used to stop and stare at her, Hilcias, and my heart would beat as fast as a hummingbird’s heart for her beauty and my eyes would drop little tears of joy for her love.

She was the field.

She was the hummingbird.

She was the Izote.

She was beauty.

She was love.”

from poems for a brown eyed girl

She stood 

to her knees

in the water. 

She felt 

the swirl 

around her legs 

as it moved 

back and forth, 

in and out 

with the tide. 

She tasted 

the salt 

of the water 

as it splashed 

against her body 

and broke apart 

into a thousand drops 

that caressed her face 

and touched her lips. 

She listened 

to the elemental song 

of the water 

as it shushed the evening 

with a lullaby 

sung for ages. 

She looked 

with brown eyes

at the shades 

of blue water 

as it moved gently 

toward the horizon 

and the sky.

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

notes from public school - day 51

One of my favorite writers, Kate DiCamillo, wrote, “Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.”

Do you know her work?

I love her novel The Tale of Despereaux.

I try to teach my students to walk around in the shoes of the characters of the stories they are reading. When I read this book, I found that Despereaux’s shoes fit me well. I so identified with the little mouse on his big quest to rescue a beautiful human princess from the rats that at the end of some of the chapters I found myself with tears rolling down my cheeks.

“Yes,” I thought, “I would have thought...I would have done...I would have seen things exactly the way Despereaux did.”

As a writer, I agree with DiCamillo.

Wholeheartedly.

As a teacher, I agree with her, too.

Teaching is seeing and paying attention.

Here is one thing I saw today.

One of my students has a younger brother with autism. He is in one of the four exceptional children’s classes we have at my school.

I check in on our exceptional children and their teachers first thing each morning.

I give a fist bump to every person and sit down to talk and eat with them.

This morning, I looked up and there was my student, her left arm around the shoulders of her little brother, helping him with his breakfast.

He is non-verbal, but his face spoke a thousand words as she leaned over and tenderly kissed his cheek before heading down to the 4th grade hall to begin her day that includes math and science with me.

His face spoke, “My sister loves me,” and his smile shone throughout the school cafeteria as if it were a light.

It was a light.

His smile.

Her act of kindness and love.

My student might make an A on a standardized math test on a random day in her 4th grade year.

Or she might make an F.

But these academic measurements cannot measure the depth of her heart and the beauty of her life.

Her heart is deep and her life is beautiful.

Pay attention.

from Trevor’s window - a novel in progress

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

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

He turned around slowly and looked at me through the lens of the glass. 

His magnified eye was astonishingly big and brown – as big as the world and as brown as the turned soil in the fields of our farm.

“Carver, why you up?” I asked. It’s the middle of the night.”

“Cain’t sleep,” he answered.

“What you doin’?”

“Study’in’ a tomato.”

”Why?”

”Did you know tomatoes come from the Andes Mountains 'round Peru in South America? And that they're fruits and not vegetables 'cause they have seeds inside of’em and 'cause they come from a flowering plant? And that they're good for your heart and can fight certain kinds of cancer?“

I walked to him and knelt beside him. 

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

I saw clearly the parts that my teacher taught to me at school – the colored part that is the iris and the black part that is the pupil. 

But it was Carver who taught me how these parts work together to help us see.

His lessons always began and ended with questions and were filled with an amazing assortment of facts he had memorized from the old set of encyclopedias in our house.

“Carter, you know the five senses?” he asked one time.

”Yeah. Let me think…seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching...is that right?”

”Yep. 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?

There’s a thin layer on the inside of the eyeball. It’s the retina. Nobody could see into the retina until microscopes were invented. 

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

Those rods and cones find rays of light and turn them into signals for these things called 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?“

“Yeah, 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 gently put my arm around his shoulders and held him close to me.