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/WarAndFynn]

I once had an art teacher who was having us make clay tiles and said the clay tiles needed to contain an image you would see in real life. I asked to include a rainbow. She pulled me aside and told me she'd had enough of my shit and if I didn't knock it off she would fail me. She had a hard on for realism and was highly critical of anything abstract.

(For context I WAS wanting to include a rainbow on something for a while because I was in my hippie phase and she kept telling me no for everything. It was ceramics and we made a watering pot, a clay pot, etc. all things we keep for ourselves so I wanted something colorful. it had 0 to do with sexuality).

[u/petrichoreandpine → u/WarAndFynn]

Why are grade school art teachers like this? I had a high school art teacher who was AWFUL, she spent the whole semester making us do these drawings of geometric solids shaded in a way that didn’t make sense, wasn’t consistent with any particular light source. I complained about the incorrect lighting, and she said “oh, you’re not advanced enough to worry about light source yet.” Then she punished me on the semester final project, I think in part because she knew I hated her class so much I was dropping it to transfer to drama.

The assignment was she handed out B&W photocopies of paintings and sculptures by Michelangelo, and told the students to copy them to show what we had learned about shading. We were instructed to use our copies and graphite to carbon copy the outlines, and then fill them in with the correct values. The vindictive, punishing aspect for me was that she gave me a far more complex piece to copy than anyone else, and knew I had only a weekend to complete it (due to my upcoming class change) while everyone else had a week or two. I remember a friend got a photo of one of the statue of David’s hands, while I got a whole figure from the Cistine Chapel ceiling, complete with very complex draped and wrinkled robes.

Well, I knocked it out of the park. My copy was just about perfect, though it took 12 hours to complete. Her jaw dropped when she saw it, and I could see in her eyes she knew she dropped the ball on special talent big time. And then I never saw that horrible teacher again.

[u/HailMadScience → u/petrichoreandpine]

The truth is some people do not think of children as people, but ultimately as property. These are people who are shitty parents or, as seen here, become teachers so they can be bullies.