ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 9, 1996 TAG: 9612090013
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL TURNER STAFF WRITER
HERE'S ONE TEACHER who literally pushes her subject on kids as she teaches them about texture and color.
Mary Brown is the art teacher with the cart.
She went to the cart to get a feather, but she had to search for it. The cart was stacked with books, colored markers, crayons, drawing paper, glue, pencils, scissors and other art supplies.
"I've got so much stuff on the cart today that I can't find it," she told the first-graders at Morningside Elementary School in Roanoke.
The children knew what she meant. They see the cart every week when Brown arrives for art lesson. She calls it the "art cart."
Brown finally found the feather and moved slowly around the room and let each boy and girl stroke it. "Feel how soft it is, how smooth."
She used the feather in her lesson on texture in art. She explained the difference between smooth and rough texture and cited examples.
Brown, recently named Virginia's Elementary Art Educator of the Year, told the children to feel the bottom of their shoes.
First-grader Clay Winter rubbed his hand over the soles of his sneakers. The tread was rough, he said.
"That's what texture is - the way something feels," Brown told the children.
To better explain it, she showed them how to do crayon rubbing. The children placed a thin sheet of paper over a piece of the netting from a bag for oranges and then rubbed it with a crayon to create a design.
Next, she gave them pieces of sandpaper and had them rub the crayon over a sheet of paper on the rough side. "You can see the design it makes on your paper," she said.
When the class began, Brown asked her pupil helpers to get the art textbooks from the cart and pass them out to their classmates.
"The cart was so full I didn't have room for all of the books, so you'll have to share them today," she told the children.
When the class was over, the helpers collected the books and put them back on the cart.
Brown takes the cart with her when she teaches each Tuesday and Thursday at Morningside. Because of growth in enrollment, the school has no vacant room for art classes.
Brown goes into the regular classrooms for her classes. She teaches six classes that last about 45 minutes each. She teaches about 125 children a day.
Each morning, she loads the cart with all of the books and supplies she will need for each class that day.
One day this past week, she began in a second grade class, teaching children how to make paper jumping-jack figures. Next, she went to a first-grade class for the lesson on texture, and then she moved on to a third grade class for a lesson in making papier-mache masks.
And so it went throughout the day as she rolled her cart between classrooms - and another class every 45 minutes.
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday each week, Brown teaches at Huff Lane MicroVillage School and Round Hill Primary. She spends half of the day at one school and the rest of the day at the other.
She doesn't have to use the cart at Huff Lane and Round Hill, which have art rooms. The children come to her for classes.
As an itinerant art teacher, Brown is instructing nearly 700 children at the three schools. Most of the pupils have an art class weekly, but some have art every other week because she can't squeeze all of them in every week.
Brown, 58, has been riding the elementary art circuit for 17 years in Roanoke. Her school assignments have changed over the years, but she has always taught at three or four schools each year. She has taught thousands of children during her career.
Like Brown, eight of the city's 10 elementary art teachers travel among schools. The two largest elementary schools - Fallon Park and Westside - have their own art teachers.
The remaining 19 city elementary schools share the other eight teachers. The school system doesn't have enough money for each school to have its own teacher, said Sandy Smith, fine arts supervisor.
"Some school systems have had to reduce their art staff because of budget constraints, but fortunately we haven't," she said.
Roanoke County's elementary art program operates similarly, with each teacher serving several schools. The county has six art teachers for its 17 elementary schools.
Brown is a creative, tireless teacher who deserves the statewide award from the Virginia Art Education Association, Smith said. Brown was also named Southwest Virginia Elementary Art Educator of the Year.
"She's a bright spot on the staff of every school where she teaches," Smith said. "She's one of those people who are almost irreplaceable - always very positive and always trying to help her students."
The children love Brown.
"She teaches us how to draw," said Stella Cotton, a second-grader at Morningside. "We've made necklaces and other things."
Justin Crockett said his class made witches at Halloween. Eight-year-old Alisha Conrad said she learned to draw Goldilocks, the little girl in the story with the three bears.
The children in teacher Pearl Stifler's class applauded Brown one day last week when they were told that she had been named the top elementary art teacher in Virginia.
Brown also teaches a class in art and crafts for prospective teachers two days a week at Roanoke College.
A North Carolina native and graduate of Radford University, Brown taught high school art in Lynchburg and Henrico County for five years before coming to Roanoke. She also has a master's degree from Hollins College.
She has taught for 22 years, but she took 10 years off while her two daughters were growing up.
Brown said she never considered returning to teaching art in high school. "I just got into teaching at the elementary level and kept on going."
Teaching elementary children is different from high school, she said. "In high school, you get to know the students; but in elementary schools, there are so many children you don't know their names."
Some of her former students come up to her when she's in public places and tell her that they remember her. But she frequently doesn't remember them because she's taught so many children.
Brown said it would be nice to stay at one school and work with individual students, but that's not likely to happen for most elementary schools in the city.
"We are lucky to have art in city elementary schools because some school systems don't," she said. "I'm grateful for what we have."
Keeping elementary children interested in art and motivated isn't a problem, she said. "Children love to do things. You don't have to push them."
The biggest challenge with young children is their short attention span, particularly the first-and second-graders. But she said the 40-45 minute classes work well because she can keep their attention that long.
In her classes, Brown teaches crafts such as quilt design and ceramics as well as drawing, painting, watercolor and other creative skills. She also works with math and social studies teachers to develop art lessons that are related to those subjects.
"In a fifth-grade class, we might work on geometric figures and radial symmetry that are part of the standards of learning for math," she said.
Brown has a studio and loves to paint, but she stays so busy with teaching that she has little time and energy left to create her own art.
"I keep thinking that I will do some in the summer, but there's never much time left because there is so much else to do."
LENGTH: Long : 137 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON\Staff. Mary Brown works on an art projectby CNBwith students at Morningside Elementary School in Roanoke. She was
recently named Virginia's Elementary Art Educator of the Year.
color.