He is coach to some, Jim to others, but during most weekdays he is Mr. Haas.
Mr. Haas, who always meets students getting off a bus at Dual Immersion Academy with a high-five.
Mr. Haas, who has nearly every student’s name memorized before the first week of school is out.
Mr. Haas, who once kissed a semi-snotty pig for a fundraiser, purposely mixes up siblings’ names, is die-hard for baseball and likes it when kids slip him cafeteria cookies.
This is Jim Haas’ 17th year teaching P.E. at Dual Immersion (DIA) in Grand Junction and, for most of those years, he held class outside under cold clouds or hot sun, on blacktop, green grass, ice or mud and, sometimes, in the library.
During a flexibility unit with yoga, he used to tell his students about how most people practice yoga with soft background music, “but our music is going to be cars going by, firetrucks going by,” he recalled, rolling his eyes at the traffic on Broadway just north of the dual-language (Spanish and English) education school.
He would turn the playground into an obstacle course for the younger grades and teach the older ones how to juggle scarves, which was good for rainy days when P.E. had to move into the small music room, cafeteria or library in the older Riverside Education building.
Juggling also is good for testing weeks because it’s a left-brain, right-brain activity that helps with concentration, Haas said. So he’ll continue to teach it, only these days he can stick with balls instead of scarves, if he wants to.
Haas, 58, finally has a gym. It has been a year since it opened, a project completed with funds from the 2017 District 51 bond measure. But oh, the gym still has an unfaded newness in teaching possibilities for Haas.
He can teach basketball!
(There was only one sad hoop on the playground.)
He can teach curling!
(He taught a unit using rolling floor sets from USA Curling, and then had a bonspiel, aka curling tournament, that was enthusiastically attended by the whole school in December.)
He can easily enter a spacious P.E. storage room!
(He shared a small closet with the janitors for years.)
He also has an office!
Haas’ office, which used to skip around the school from year to year, is now conveniently off the gym and it has allowed him to decorate.
“The Sandlot” is a favorite movie, so there is a small poster from it on the wall. There’s a pennant from the Colorado Rockies, which is his favorite baseball team after the Fruita Monument High School Wildcats — he’s the junior varsity baseball coach and a varsity assistant. And there are photos of his family. His wife, Dana Mahoney-Haas, is a preschool teacher at Broadway Elementary School. He has two sons and a daughter.
There are also items from his students, including sheets of paper stapled together to fit “I Love PE” in large letters surrounded by hearts and stars.
While having a gym has changed some things and allowed him to teach bowling, it hasn’t changed Haas’ morning routine.
Each school day as the sun beams over Grand Mesa, Haas is on the sidewalk in front of the school waiting for buses to arrive and sporting his trademark blue Fruita Wildcats sweatshirt, a baseball cap and no gloves even in 25 degree or lower temperatures.
He shrugs tough at the cold, calling it a baseball attribute, but it amazes many in the staff at DIA.
“This is good for you!” he told kindergarten teacher Rosita Moglia.
“He sold it well,” Moglia said, but she’s still fine staying warm inside.
Haas talks and high-fives each student getting off the morning buses, gently coaxing a sobbing kindergartner out of her bus seat and through the door.
“It’s a regular occurrence,” he said.
Humor also is a regular thing with Haas.
One boy got off the bus with a fat wrestling belt over his shoulder, obviously proud of it, so obviously Haas had to ask about it.
“I beat John Cena!” the boy claimed.
“I beat him and Hulk Hogan when they were together!” Haas shot back.
“Did you talk to your mom about who her music teacher was?” he asked a grinning girl.
That’s right, it was Mr. Haas.
During his first couple years at DIA, back when the school was housed at New Emerson Elementary, he taught art and music as well as P.E. “Needless to say, there were no music programs,” he said.
He also would help Moglia by reading with her students.
“He can read?!” they always wondered.
Sometimes the little kindergartners are scared of Haas the first week of school — “who is that blue giant?” said Wendy Carvajal, a DIA kindergarten teacher.
That doesn’t last long, though. Students soon are eager for P.E.
You can have an awesome, fun lesson students really like and learn from, but at its end when you ask them about their favorite part of the day, it inevitably will be P.E., said Lisa McCall, a first-grade teacher, shaking her head.
And then there are the nicknames. McCall’s 7-year-old daughter Charlie is “Chuckles” and a kindergarten boy is “El Capitan” because of a T-shirt he wore one day.
Haas has an endless supply of stories or jokes that get repeated to parents.
Carvajal’s daughter came home one day and told her, “Mami, Mr. Haas told us that his friend was going to Denver but he read on the road, ‘Grand Junction right, Denver left,’ so his friend was back home because Denver left.”
Parents get to hear about Haas’ grandparents who lived beyond 100 years old — Haas talks about them when stressing the importance of a healthy lifestyle and perhaps walking through snow uphill both ways, somewhere — and how heart disease runs on one side of his family. It’s why he supports the Kids Heart Challenge for the American Heart Association while teaching students how to jump rope.
Depending on how his students do at fundraising this year, Haas could get two 5-gallon buckets of green slime dumped on him.
Jumping rope requires total body control, Haas said. It benefits the heart, develops balance among other things, and it’s currently what his students are doing in P.E.
Even fifth-graders donned in long johns and snow pants for a recent cross-country skiing field trip didn’t get out of jumping rope: forward and back, on one foot, skipping, shuffling, speed turns, “the skier” side to side and “the rock star.”
“Like Elton John?” asked a student.
“No! Imagine Dragons,” Haas replied, then demonstrated the move, a scissor kick between snaps of the rope.
While teaching P.E. and coaching baseball, Haas is in his zone. However, he also teaches computer skills to all the students at DIA. Similar to how he adjusted to having no gym, he has adjusted to teaching out of his element.
“Basically, I’m big on typing and on research,” he said.
Just as he has certain games for P.E. — American Eagle, Tractor Tag, Snakes in the Grass — he has a certain game for computer lab: Stump The Teacher.
It basically entails students doing research and asking him any question based on their research.
How old is the sun?
Where was the biggest gold nugget found and when?
How many days until Easter? (“I don’t care,” Haas might have answered.)
Who is the tallest person in the world?
There are “Star Wars,” Pokémon and soccer questions. One fourth-grader nearly always asks tough math questions.
“It’s a fun game,” said Haas, who often is beaten, something the students never seem to tire of accomplishing.
“I’m living the dream,” Haas said.
There are Monday mornings when students walk up to him and say, “I missed you this weekend!”
“It’s kind of nice to have made that impact,” said Haas, who encourages his students to try at least 1% harder at whatever they are doing each day.
And having a gym makes all of that nicer and more climate-controlled. “From time to time, I sit here and think, I used to teach P.E. here, but it was blacktop,” he said while rolling a white board across the smooth gym floor.
He doesn’t miss the ice or yelling over car traffic.
The students love his spirit, whether he is telling them stories, getting them to jump higher or teasing them, said Monica Heptner, DIA’s principal.
“He’s just a great instructor,” she said.
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