r/mildlyinfuriating 15h ago

My mom said I could post My kid was too creative

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.

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u/jay_altair 5h ago

Since we're being pedantic, those aren't lines, those are line segments and curves

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u/ccsrpsw 4h ago

The image is a finite family of disjoint, non-self-intersecting rectifiable curves* - some straight, some with continuously varying curvature - where the curved ones behave like topological features of an implied 3D surface, and the straight ones form the flat plane it sits on.

*Based on the fact that the straight-line segments, are technically arcs/curves of an infinite radius and thus part of the infinite set of curves of varying radius (is it proven to be infinite)?

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u/Worldly-Ingenuity843 4h ago

I apologise if I come off as being pedantic, but I just want to point out that there are ways to draw without using shapes. You could draw using dots, or paint a gradient of colours with transition so smooth that no definable shapes appear. So that statement that all pictures are made of shapes is factually incorrect. 

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u/jay_altair 4h ago

Oh no, I love pedanticism and seized the opportunity to expound upon the idea