For Roseville's Teacher of the Year Semifinalist, Creativity is Paramount

Sarah Wolfe, Emmet D. Williams Elementary’s lone art teacher and a semifinalist for the Minnesota Teacher of the Year honor, has just finished giving instructions to 23 jello-limbed second-graders on how to transform the fantastic pencil-and-paper furniture designs they dreamed up the previous week into small-scale mockups of “sculpture chairs.” 

Students are to take a sheet of pressboard (the chair’s seat) and solder it with Elmer’s to paper towel rolls (its back) and toilet paper rolls (legs).

Wolfe has shown her students a picture of a radish table carved by their “inspiration artist” Craig Nutt and encouraged creativity in their conception of what constitutes a chair.

One student has designed a macaroni-and-cheese chair, another a “kitty chair.” There’s a Save the “Wold” chair (Explanation: “Sunday was Earth Day”) and a trio of boys has teamed up to create a chair that doubles as a two-person basketball arcade.

“We’ve talked about how our art is going to serve a function or a purpose,” Wolfe has told her students.

Now, the 7- and 8-year-olds are swarming the classroom, the pencil throwing and pressboard frisbeeing surprisingly orderly.

A boy with a black bowl cut, whose T-shirt depicts a fuzzy blue monster strumming a guitar, spots a reserve of already completed paper chair prototypes perched, above reach, on a storage cabinet.

His eyes glint with malice as the sight of the finished chairs gives him a notion of what function or purpose his art might serve.

“We can hit people with chairs,” he says, initiating a gentle “scissors duel” with a classmate. “It’s going to be a miracle.”

A career in Roseville Schools

Wolfe sees each of her 1,000 students—kindergarteners on up to sixth-graders—once per week for about 50 minutes. She’s the only full-time art teacher at Emmet Williams and Little Canada Elementary.

“Since I’ve had my students for seven years by the time they’re sixth-graders, I get to know them fairly well, and I do a lot of interest-based art,” she said. “Kids are really interested in technology and how art and technology interact.”

To channel that interest, Wolfe has created units in digital photography, computer art and comic design.

Wolfe grew up in the Twin Cities, going through the Mounds View Public Schools (a fact Roseville students begrudge her) and eventually graduating from Bethel University.

In fall 2000, while still at Bethel, Wolfe started student teaching in the art program at Roseville High School and was later hired full time. She’s now been teaching for 11 years in the district, seven at the elementary level.

She does separate lessons for each grade level, and recent projects include Picasso masks, clay nests, pottery mugs (requirement: must hold liquid), glazed castles and charcoal self-portraits.

Wolfe said her favorite part of her job is watching her students’ eyes light up when their “imagination becomes concrete.”

“The best comments I get are ‘Look what I made, Mrs. Wolfe!’” she said, her voice rising to the dramatic soprano of childish enthusiasms, “or ‘Look what this is, Mrs. Wolfe!’ or ‘Can you believe that I did this, Mrs. Wolfe?’

“To be able to turn to them and say ‘Oh, what a wonderful artist you are!’ or ‘Look how creative you are!’ and to be able to make a connection between their giftedness and what they’re creating, that’s what my whole job is about.”