Everybody knows how to paint, right? You put the brush in the paint and you brush the paint onto the wall, the window frame, the clapboard. What’s to learn?

“Sometimes, you have to show them how to hold the brush,” says Steve Crane.

Crane’s a painter. And when he teaches the ways of the trade, he often finds the first lesson begins with the proper grip.

On Monday morning, he led a crew into a women’s residence at Amos House in Providence. Paint was mixed, drop cloths were put down, jobs were assigned. And work was begun to improve the house and the lives of those with brushes in hand.

“After 18 years in prison, I’ll have a skill,” says Rodney Grudain.

He has been in prison, gotten out and gone back in. He is finding opportunities extremely limited for a man who has spent most of his adult life on the inside. So the carpentry course at Amos House is probably the best shot he’s going to have to reverse a wrong way life.

There are 14 people in the current class. Twelve of them have been or still are in the Adult Correctional Institutions. Some have been paroled to Amos House.

One person was dropped because of a failed random drug test.

The 13-week course is not easy. The textbooks are thick and packed with detail. There is math to learn, and that is something many of those in the class haven’t gone near in years. The Pythagorean theorem was part of the discussion before work began Monday morning.

For some, there is literacy training. For all the members of the class, there is a sense that this course, which will give them real credentials to carry into the construction trades, is a dividing line — slip back or move ahead.

Amos House, which has expanded all over its South Providence neighborhood, has become a vital stop on the way back. People can learn carpentry. They can learn culinary arts. They can learn if they’re really ready to make serious changes.

On March 13, Nelia Oliveira learned she was going to be paroled from the ACI after serving eight months for “driving without consent of owner.” On March 17, she started the carpentry course at Amos House. She and Joann Clinton showed up on Monday in their prison greens. They were dropped off by a prison van and were picked up at the end of the day.

For Clinton, who has another year before her next parole hearing, the class was a natural next step from the house on Potters Avenue in Providence that she and other ACI women built with Habitat For Humanity. The house was dedicated March 29. Clinton couldn’t attend. She was in carpentry class.

“Things just kind of fell into place,” she says.

She and Oliveira are the first inmates to come to the course while still in prison. Oliveira goes home to her husband and two children in Pawtucket on April 16.

“I believe this is a blessing for me,” says Oliveira. “I’m going full force with this one.”

She used to own an ice cream truck. She did housecleaning. Now, she thinks about floors and windows and doors.

“This connects them to the heart of the industry,” says Bill Scott, employment specialist at Amos House. “And Rhode Island builders support the training.”

Scott says the curriculum is the same as that at career technical centers. The names of those who complete the course go into a national database of people who can do the work.

Carole Dwyer, the warden of the women’s prison, says the big risk for women coming out is that they can’t support themselves and so return to the things that got them sent to prison in the first place.

“We really want them to stay out,” she says.

The courses at Amos House are wonderful opportunities, but Dwyer says they are just not available to some prisoners because of their security status. They can’t leave the prison. There might be a no-contact order in place, for example. She would like to see the courses brought inside the prison. That could take awhile.

The students who do attend the class learn the building basics with tools in hand. They paint under Steve Crane’s guidance, but they also learn how to prepare the surface before the paint goes on. They work 25 hours a week and attend two classroom sessions. For many, it is a matter of learning how to learn again, and that is no easy thing.

“I haven’t had math since high school,” says Oliveira. “The first day, there’s a math quiz. It surprised me — length, width, height. Getting back to math, geometry, pre-algebra, that’s part of it.”

The course comes with no guarantees but with great incentives. Just finishing those 13 weeks can mean a huge step away from the bad days.

There is a real opportunity here, a chance to make good choices instead of bad ones. And it seems safe to say that everyone in that class on Monday morning knows what a rare and precious thing that can be.

bkerr@projo.com