Maine South High School teacher who died praised by colleagues, students: ‘passionate about what he was teaching’

Francisco Barbas was the good kind of intense, his friends say.

“It’s not that he would peek at something a little bit and then leave it aside, he would really go for it with all of his energy,” Barbas’ best friend and colleague at Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Jose Arguello, said.

A Spanish instructor at Maine South since 1994, Barbas — known as “Don Francisco” to students — infused his classes with art, music and literature.

Friends, family and students told Pioneer Press Barbas approached his work, relationships and interests with what Arguello, his fellow Spanish teacher, called “a positive intensity.”

Before he died June 5 at 59, he had been looking forward to drilling down into his recently-acquired passion for architecture as his retirement approached. His death came six weeks after he suffered a severe heart attack, according to an obituary posted by Davenport Family Funeral Home on Legacy.com.

In the classroom, “you could tell he was very passionate about what he was teaching,” Maine South rising senior Isabela Alvarado said. “He was just intrigued to be there; it felt like he was also learning with us.”

A self-taught guitarist, Barbas would bring his guitar and printed-out lyrics to class and lead students in song. Alvarado said the song “American Pie” was a particular favorite of his.

He was also a die-hard Beatles fan. At his funeral, his daughter Alicia sang the band’s 1968 track “I Will,” and the family also played Paul McCartney’s 1997 song “Calico Skies.”

Barbas sang a version of “Calico Skies” himself, which his daughter recently uploaded to her YouTube page along with videos of her father singing Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and the two of them singing The Beatles’ “Got to Get You Into My Life.” Barbas’ own page features him and Alicia covering “Falling Slowly” from the 2007 movie “Once” and “Audition” from the 2016 movie “La La Land.”

When he and Alicia recorded covers of songs, his wife of 35 years, Jazmín Barbas, remembered how “the harmonies had to match up and he would always make sure you know that they would go track by track by track and just make sure everything sounded the way that he wanted it.”

Barbas insisted on quality in his music but also with everything else. Arguello said a reliable way to annoy Barbas was to present him with something that wasn’t all the way thought through.

“He was a perfectionist and one of his phrases was ‘if you are going to do something, do it right or don’t do it at all,’” Arguello said. “When something was half baked and not thought through… that would drive him crazy.”

“He never started a project unless he felt that he was inspired,” Jazmín Barbas said. “And once that inspiration entered him, he would take that all the way through till the end.”

Jazmín said she and Barbas first met while she was traveling in Spain and were both out with friends in Seville. They married the next year, at the Memorial Chapel of the Cathedral of Seville, and lived in Spain for two years before moving to Chicagoland.

There, Barbas learned English and attended the University of Illinois-Chicago before they both went on to teach for District 207 schools — he at Maine South and she at Maine West.

At Maine South, Barbas kept a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s iconic Guernica painting on the wall of his classroom. He used it as an entry point into the history of Spain in the 1930s for students, Arguello said.

Barbas’ class materials also reflected his passion for literature. He was particularly partial to the Argentinian writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Arguello said.

Alvarado told Pioneer Press that class with Barbas felt like a conversation.

“(He) was teaching it to us so that we wanted to know more from him,” she said. “He made it feel like a conversation… He was very much a storyteller and if at any point in class we had questions about what we were reading, he’d stop.”

Maine South World Language Department Chair Tona Costello said that apart from Barbas’ “obvious talents as an educator,” Barbas was a positive, calm and happy presence at Maine South — as well as “a gifted artist, a master at Photoshop and his handwriting could easily be mistaken for a professional font.”

“He will leave a legacy that will no doubt be transformative for all of us who had the honor of knowing him and spending quality time in his presence,” Costello said.

While students did leave Barbas’ classes with a grasp of the past perfect or subjunctive mood, Arguello said they also came away with an appreciation for the language and the many cultures and nations it serves.

“Every language reflects the culture of its speakers, the attitude toward life of its speakers,” Arguello said. “That is a difficult thing to teach.”

He said he believed Barbas was successful in conveying that attitude toward life because his interests were so wide-ranging.

As a friend, Arguello said, he would remember Barbas’ intellect and humor, the way he was a good listener and the seriousness with which he approached his friendships, his work and his family.

It was difficult to reconcile the idea that somebody who he considered a model husband, father, teacher and friend had died, Arguello said.

Services for Barbas were held June 12.