Warmth of class melts all troubles

Teacher Nicole Jacobson walked into her morning kindergarten class at Adams Elementary School on Spokane’s South Side. It was Tuesday morning, the first day back after the holiday break. She was feeling blue. The news of the 12 trapped West Virginia miners haunted her.

Just as she was wondering where she would find her usual energy, a student approached. The little girl said, “Mrs. Jacobson, two words! One: Be careful of my thumb. Two: I have to go to the bathroom.”

Mrs. Jacobson laughed a blues-chasing-away laugh. She was back full tilt in her classroom of color and surprise, welcoming in 2006 with her 24 kindergartners.

2006, already! I gave up New Year’s resolutions a few years ago and borrowed from actress Debra Winger a different way to set yearly goals. Winger left show business in the mid-1990s to stay home with her kids.

“Whatever it is that melts your heart, keeps you soft and open, that’s what you should be following. And show business just made me rough and hard,” she explained in the 2002 documentary “Searching for Debra Winger.”

Volunteering in schools softens my heart. So last year, I resolved to do more of it. My great-nephew, Adam, is one of Mrs. Jacobson’s students, and once a month I enter into the parallel universe Mrs. Jacobson creates for Adam and his classmates.

Here, paper tigers climb up shelves. Gingerbread men dance across a clothesline. Chubby snowmen hold hands on the bulletin board. The alphabet is a choo-choo train.

Here, the rules of listening are listed: Sit on your pockets. Hands in your lap. Eyes on the speaker. No side talk. The kindergarten rubric is listed, too: Wow! Yes! Almost! Keep Trying!

Here, in this parallel universe of color and surprise, kindergartners call exclamation points “the excited marks at the ends of sentences.”

I walked into Mrs. Jacobson’s classroom Thursday morning, trailing behind me some sad and disturbing headlines, no excited marks at the ends of the world’s sentences. Soldiers and civilians dead in Iraq. Heartbreaking goodbye notes left by dying miners. Politicians engaged in rough and hard verbal fighting.

The children understood little about these adult headlines. The titles of their picture books, gathered in overflowing bins, offered alternative ones: “The Missing Mitten Mystery” and “The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash” and “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.”

Not that the kindergartners didn’t have concerns. Some of the glue sticks were dry. Clutching them, they walked up to Mrs. Jacobson and showed her, shaking their heads in dismay.

At one table, a lively debate ensued over whether turquoise could be counted as the color blue. Half decided yes. The others said no way. They asked me to decide. Confounded, I simply smiled. One student then asked: “Who are you anyway?”

At recess the students yelled, “Mrs. Jacobson, watch me!” They jumped rope and climbed monkey bars, hoping to catch her eyes and her praise.

Mrs. Jacobson, 34, has been a kindergarten teacher for nine years. Volunteers help her in many ways, she said, but mostly by providing another pair of watch-me eyes. And by listening to her kindergartners.

“They have to tell their stories,” she told me. “They are bursting with them.”

As I stood in the playground, I looked toward the houses and apartment complexes surrounding Adams Elementary School. I thought of the people living there and all the folks who live in the homes that surround every school in the Inland Northwest. Some of them have discovered one secret to the happiness and health we hope to garner from our New Year’s resolutions.

They have crossed their streets into neighborhood schools and said, “Yes, I’ll volunteer here.” And their adult hearts have softened. They’ve learned to be careful of thumbs. And someday, if they are lucky, it might just rain meatballs.