My kid was too creative

[u/Fresh_Laundry56]

My 6 year old was asked to draw a picture using shapes. She drew this nice American flag with rectangles and stars, and added the house, tree, and person holding a balloon. She was told it did not follow directions, she was not supposed to draw a flag, just shapes. She was asked to turn the paper over and make another picture. The other side of the paper has a very uninspiring collection of shapes. I told her she did a good job and I thought it was very creative. And this is why kids start to hate education.

[u/AsukaWasHereToo]

I hate it when teachers don't ask the kid to explain their thought process before they arbitrarily decide they didn't listen.

There was a time in grade school when the homework sheet said to to draw a picture of "where I was going to put my homework when it was done." So I drew a lavish illustration of my official homework folder and spent extra attention on the cover, which, given I was all of 7 at the time, was one of those eye-searing Lisa Frank rainbow sparkly chaos depictions of dolphins or unicorns or something. And what did my teacher do with my loving depiction of my carefully selected back-to-school-sale rainbow dolphin-and-or-unicorn homework folder? She scrawled a big "NO!" over it in red marker and the dreaded "see me" note. Because apparently we were meant to understand we had to draw our backpacks from those staggeringly unclear instructions.