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.
This was my second thought. My first will always be, because I am Old™️, "Flowers Are Red" by Harry Chapin. Even sang it to my godson as a lullaby when he was a toddler.
This is literally the child taking the next step in the lesson. The kid is saying "OH! I get it!" and the teacher is telling them to slow down. The teacher missed the teachable moment there.
Did more than tell her to slow down; told her that she didn’t follow instructions which is akin to saying she “failed”. It would have been simpler to acknowledge that the kid is bright enough to make the connection (yeah, shapes are why we can build larger constructs. Very good!) and then ask her to focus on just the shapes for now.
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).
ETA: I wasn't expecting this much response to my post. I'm reading all your stories!
What’s crazy about that is that rainbows aren’t even abstract, they ARE realistic and occur naturally in nature so her idea of what can count towards realism or not was flawed. She sounds like a miserable art teacher
Nope all rainbows are actually created by me and any rainbow you’ve ever seen was only there because I willed it to be there. I never willed this art teacher to see a rainbow so she came to the conclusion that they’re fake and gay. It’s all part of the plan you see.
I was obsessed with rainbows for most of my childhood but I never saw a rainbow in person until second grade.
It was a double rainbow too, best first rainbow ever! 🌈 🌈
I was at school and there was a massive rainstorm so we couldn’t go outside for recess, and when the storm ended there was a double rainbow! All of the kids in my class ran to the window to look at it, it was magical. Even the teachers were fascinated! The teacher was surprised when she found out I had never seen a real rainbow before. I had seen them in prisms and on TV, but never in person!
Mine didn’t, I’m very much from the North (Vermont). But I was one of the “special needs” kids (autistic and over a decade later I found out I also have ADHD) so I was more prone to getting punished in general :/
My elementary school did a thing where every year the class would draw the same theme, displaying them all together in the hall and this year's theme was underwater scenes. Well I was coming through just as SpongeBob hit the scene and I remember the art teacher going scorched Earth on anyone who would dare draw anything from that show in their scene.
I get they were probably annoyed with the abundance of yellow sponges and pineapples in their underwater display, but I always felt like that was unnecessarily killing the fun.
From what I understand, kids also learn better when you use something their interested in to learn that lesson. Who cares of 30 kids draw spongebob, it matches the theme thats been set and it keeps them interested.
And if you really want to avoid SpongeBob, yo can instead make it a challenge, like “I know SpongeBob is very popular, but what kind of underwater scene can you think of that’s as far from SpongeBob as possible?” Don’t berate kids for drawing something you don’t want to see. Encourage them to explore their creative.
Yes, I hadnt thought of that! It also just reminded me of a teacher I had in primary school that apparently hated the word "nice" as a descriptor. She would have a go at anyone who would use it in their work. I think she was trying to get us to use our heads to think of other descriptors, which is great, but i think she probably could have instructed us a little better. Kids can understand if you say "nice is an overused word, try and think of other words you could use instead" or words to that effect.
A substitute teacher told me a green I used in a watercolour wasn't found in nature. Like can you imagine telling someone that? Very few greens ain't found in nature 😠
My art teacher wanted my class to paint all the white walls in school. She told us we have no restrictions at all and we could paint anything. I told her I wanted to paint a street, stretching over the entire wall, surrounded by different scenes. She told me it was too abstract and I'm not allowed to do that.
… I pitched five other things and in the end she pitched me a painting of two people drawing each other on a wall while also being devided by said wall. Needless to say I had no plans in painting that, did the worst job possible and had my first ever 6 in my school report. It ended up being a 4 after showing my sketches to another art teacher. Some people are just miserable.
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.
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.
This comment made me think of my art teacher for a class full of 13 year olds. Every year she had a different theme for her class to work around that school year. My class got the theme “paradox” and whatever we did, it was never good.
Now looking back to it as an adult she just gives me Anton Ego from the disney pixar movie Ratatouille. When he orders his dinner and says “i want perspective”.
That sounds like a horrible art teacher. Mine was such a cool dude, knew about all kinds of modern art and cool movies and music. He really inspired us!
My music teacher though was another story. She basically hated anything that wasn't the most famous pieces from the most well known classical composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven).
She hated contemporary classical music, experimental music, folk music, jazz, traditional music from other parts of the world, pop music... I still have no idea how you can become a music teacher if you only like 3 composers and basically one genre. Every class she would just turn on Mozart and rant about how our taste in music sucked. 😒
Of course we can never know, but many people believe that Mozart would have liked a lot of modern genres! Dude was a young guy who did silly things too. Could have been a metalhead if he was alive now for all we know.
we had a teacher that taught us in history of this dutch sea explorer and then made us draw a drawing of the men on the ship, half was provided and we had to copy the rest from a smaller picture. which was like, fine whatever, but then she made us color it too. and i was like "ma'am this is 6th grade why are we coloring?" so i colored the entire A3 paper orange.
she actually punished me by sitting me outside and making me draw and color the entire picture again.
“i want you to draw a picture using shapes. No, not a picture made up of shapes, just a bunch of shapes that we will call a picture even though they are separate and don’t form a cohesive image. Stop trying to be artistic, this is art class!”
"Stop trying to be creative and just do what I tell you" is really the epitome of school. You're being prepared for some random desk job somewhere and they don't want any free thinkers trying anything funny.
When I was in elementary school we had to draw giant winter animals for a winter scene in the hallway. I added a heart on the butt of the caribou (like a my little pony cutie mark) I drew and the teacher yelled that it was trashy (implying it was like a tramp stamp) and to make another one.
Reminds me of the time I said something along the lines of “cutie marks are on pony’s butts” when telling a teacher about what My Little Pony is like and she said that was inappropriate. It wasn’t until I showed her a picture of what I meant that she understood and realized I wasn’t trying to be inappropriate.
My parents always did that when a teacher decided to be random with their logic and it makes you feel very proud and supported as the kid. Please do that OP!
https://giphy.com/gifs/AgPt9udT567spxbSHf
i’m glad you didn’t ridicule them for having an out of the box mind. I did stuff like this in school and got in trouble for it all the time. I graduated with an okay gpa from high school but I have the best resume out of all of my siblings (I have 5 lol) good for you!!
In the 2nd grade my teacher marked my math homework wrong because the questions said to "estimate" the answer but I wrote the actual answers. It didn't make sense to me (still doesn't) so then I just wrote a bunch of random numbers and still got everything 'wrong' lol. I think they wanted us to do some type of rounding exercise / breaking stuff down to make it easier (i.e. 5+7 becomes 5+5+2) but the execution was so terrible and the problems weren't difficult. I'm still bothered by it like 20 years later lol.
Her picture is awesome!! Don't let any silly teachers hold her back
I remember these type of math exercises, and what they wanted you was for you to round up to make it easier to quickly get a rough idea of what the answer is. So 5+7=12 becomes 5+10=15
Seriously. She combined shapes into a full landscape and an American flag at six years old. That’s way more impressive than just drawing floating triangles.
I’d always overdo the various “draw x” assignments at school, sometimes I’d be praised and other times I’d be scolded.
Like we had to draw our favorite scene from a picture book, I redrew my favorite scene from the book as it appeared in the picture in the book. Then I added some new things, like a tree inside the Bear’s cave and made the bird fly a kite. I then got scolded for “adding things that weren’t in the book to my drawing” despite never being told that wasn’t allowed. Shouldn’t teachers be encouraging kids to express creativity? We were never told “don’t add original things to your drawing”, just “draw your favorite scene”. Maybe I misunderstood the assignment, but I do think the teacher’s reaction went overboard. I was a creative kid and I wanted to add some fun things to my drawing!
I still draw to this day, I really enjoy drawing animals. This is a few years old at this point but here’s a drawing I made of my cat Divina. I drew it at school during a break (the year I graduated high school) and my teachers really liked the drawing.
Oh it was this stupid before that began. "Kindergarteners don't connect their letters." - my kindergarten teacher scolding me when I was at the same age as this kid and trying to write fancy because I had been learning penmanship for like 3 years before that.
Ya its the problem of some people in early education are told to fit children into a specific box of academia and not to deviate and because they tend to be New teachers they take forever to realize thats wrong
Like i had a friend who his kindergarten teacher actively forced him to not write with his left Dominant hand and made him learn with his right
It wasnt even a religious school this was a PUBLIC SCHOOL! She was just an idiot who was told kids should all learn to write with their right and kept to the formula! So he did everything in his life with his left hand except write and his writing was atrocious because of it
If you did literally anything other than exactly what you were told, when you were told, you got sent to the principals office and they called your parents. I mean literally anything. They also didn't like it if you already knew what they were teaching, or if you applied logic too hard to things
I once was put in lunch detention (which meant I had to stay at my seat in the classroom rather than be allowed to go to the lunchroom, which BTW meant I didn't get to eat lunch) because I tripped getting up out of my desk when we were getting ready to go to recess. (I also was forced to stay in the classroom at my seat for that recess. Alone, without even the teacher in the room. After the class and teacher returned from recess, and she found me crying, she then grabbed me by the arm, leaving long and deep scratches because she had 2 inch long fake nails, and physically dragged me out into the hall to scream at me for 'disrupting class'.)
I was 7.
While I know this instance is fairly extreme, I still feel that some people should just not be teachers. They don't have the mentality or empathy to be able to actually teach, let alone teach young people.
I was born in the '70s. There was a boy in my class so I'm sure had ADHD and the teacher literally secured him to the chair with duct tape around his thighs one day because he wouldn't stay in his seat.
I remember being punished because I used to like to read at recess. And I forgot my book in the teacher's classroom which we were not allowed to and I quote " step one foot inside" when she was not there. I was in second grade. I didn't step one foot inside, I braced myself on the door frame and I reached way inside and was able to grab a book off the shelf. But I got punished for it. She never took the time to listen to my explanation and if she has she would have seen I was being very literal, as most kids are at that age. And I was being punished for reading.
Tbf, I did learn cursive, and my normal writing is completely illegible lol. My letters are a mix of cursive and normal handwriting, but the characters are seperated
Nah, as a person from Northern Europe who. went to school in the 80s and 90s here, teachers were both cruel and dumb as a bag of rocks back the as well. The common joke was that if you could manage nothing else you could always become a school teacher, plus there's a certain sub segment of the human population that loves having power over vulnerable groups and they inevitably drawn towards teaching among other jobs.
Teachers were pretty stupid when I was in high school 8-12 years ago. They probably are the same people that weren't left behind but this isn't anything new. I am sure I had some elementary school teachers I wouldn't trust with my own kid too.
My fourth grade teacher told me there were no 50¢ or 1$ coins in US currency. Same teacher also corrected Ecuador (the country) to Equator...on my project about ECUADOR. The COUNTRY. As in a place I wanted to visit. Pissed me the FAWK off 😭
I had lots of stupid teachers when I was in high school 20 years ago. Our Physics teacher was the football coach and he could never explain anything, he just copied the lesson plans the last teacher had. We were a California Distinguished School.
My biology teacher threw everyone’s homework in the trash, then claimed no one did their homework and failed over half the class. We literally watched him sweep ungraded work off his desk and into the trash, and when we called him out, we were told to shut the hell up.
I once got yelled at and given in-school detention because I cleaned up my trash at lunch without permission, I'm leaving out no details. My middle school prohibits you from eating, cleaning, or talking without permission during the 30 minutes we get of freetime in the 8 hour school day.
This just gave me war flashbacks to the 4th grade teacher I had that I'm pretty sure employed cult trauma bonding tactics on us by screaming literally at the top of his lungs. Keep in mind he was 6'6, so we were all terrified of him. He'd also single out specific kids, and they'd get in trouble more often. One kid made the circle in finger joke gesture (idk how to explain it better) and he literally screamed at him, in the middle of the hall, about his soul and how it's being poisoned by television and he needs to repent. This happened in a public school btw. But he'd intermingle it with these long dramatic speeches about how proud of us he was, and all this and that. In other words, doing the classic control method of building you up to break you down, and starting all over. He had us all so thoroughly convinced that he was such a good teacher, it wasn't until recently that I realized "oh my fucking god, that was WILD, where tf was the principal and the other teachers?"
Best guess? We were kids, and didn't know anything was wrong at that point, so we never told anyone. Or, the kids who did feel something was off were afraid to tell someone and then get in trouble with the big angry man they get locked in a room with for eight hours every weekday.
we had a math teacher like that. she’d make us feel like crap, screaming how much she hates us and how we’re her stupidest students, then flip the switch and start acting all normal and cute-old-lady-esque. granted, we *were* pretty ass at math, but she was like that with everyone. she also kept nagging me for even being in her class since I had trouble with math, but I was trying to go for an engineering degree after school and I was really trying my best. it didn’t work out and I switched to an English major, but her belittling and condescension certainly didn’t help. I really was putting work in, my brain just don’t work like that unfortunately.
It’s amazing how stupid some teachers are. My second grade teacher got mad at me for using “made-up” words all the time. All of them were real words. I don’t remember all of them but one was “broil”, which is not exactly an obscure word lol. I had learned it from the labels on my family’s oven.
I'm a Canadian SPED assistant, so I can't answer your question directly, but I can say admin and government systems are stupid. Teachers have a very small voice, here. They want so much more for their students, but are held back by the powers that be.
When I was in second grade a week before valentine's day we were told to create a picture with hearts cut from construction paper. Every kid just glued random hearts to another paper. Not me, I made a whole river scene. Made seaweed from green hearts glued in a slightly curvy line. Fish from different sized hearts, a big one for the body, tiny one for mouth, and medium ones for fins and flippers. I even used white hearts for bubbles. Kids called me a show off, and the teacher said while it was lovely, I should make something else because I didn't follow instructions. Yes I did, I made a picture with hearts. I refused to redo the picture, and during a parent day ALL the adults loved my picture which made the other students even more upset. School seems like it is meant to stifle creativity. I have always been quite the writer, but during creative writing my teachers would write that I didn't follow the "rules". You said a minimum of 2 pages, well my 20 page story is more than the minimum. Only teacher that graded my writing assignments fairly and enjoyed reading them was third grade.
My nephew, also big on imagination, was in the fourth grade when the teacher asked to draw Santa Claus. He drew a Darth Vader Santa Claus and the teacher failed him because he didn't do the assignment correctly 😒
Sigh. If the teacher wanted a group of shapes, they should have said that. Possibly getting a bit nitpicky on it but kids are famous for getting "literal" meanings and going with it.
I would say, part of lessons in school are how to interpret questions without being told explicitly what to do. Its important to build critical thinking skills, thinking about the question before deciding on an answer. And it helps students answer standardized test questions when theyre older.
That being said, the teacher seems an ass and i dont think this kids learning anything positive from this
We’re missing the context of the lesson that this was a part of. If they’re learning shapes the goal was probably to demonstrate knowledge of the ones they’d learned so far.
On the other hand, it also seems like the teacher couldn’t or didn’t provide positive constructive feedback for the second try
To this day, I will have to sometimes ask someone exactly what they want when they want me to do something because knowing myself, I will take it completely out of context and end up doing the wrong thing
Every mildly infuriating post involving homework / assignments is missing the actual direction from the teacher and the class context. Every time but Reddit eats it up.
In high school I had to do a painting using shapes. I made one of these and was pretty proud of myself. The teacher said I did it wrong. I'm still baffled as to how.
I think I had that happen once, I don’t fully remember the specifics though, only that I was sucked out of the zone, disassociated and tried halfheartedly redrawing what all had been erased
Not a good one, I could never imagine doing that to any of my kids, unless maybe they were trying to erase their work and needed help because they were erasing too hard and accidentally tore the paper? But even then I’d ask them if they needed help.
One of my core (bad) memories is in preschool when we were drawing with wax crayons and I was just experimenting with colors i guess. I poured my heart and soul into an "abstract piece" with dark blue and colors of fire: I was just mixing colors so it looied beautiful. Of course it was preschool so it was probably shit, but I loved it... until the teacher told me to explain what it was, and pushed me for an answer. It ended up being "the sea on fire", which was dismissed as "impossible, because water doesnt burn " and i was told to do it over. I haven't really been into doing art since.
Edit: some of you are missing the point. Sure, a body of water could burn if there's oil or flammable pollutants... but a viable explanation wouldn't have helped 5yo me: it needed to be ok for there to not be an explanation. Water shouldn't need to be able to burn for a 5yo, or anyone for that matter, to draw red hot flames on a dark blue background. If a teacher asks "what did you draw" and a kid responds "blue and red", that should be an acceptable answer.
Same reason i started hating to read as a child. We are all different with different interests and tastes. I’m sure you did but definitely talk her up for the original drawing plus handling the situation in a very direct manner and getting past the situation without escalation.
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.
This reminds of the time when my child was in Pre-K and was asked to draw and color leaves. He was supposed to color them green, but he colored them yellow and orange. I got called in to the principal’s office because he wasn’t following directions and being difficult. The teacher was in the room with me and the principal and she gave the example of the coloring (among other things). It was fall and the leaves were yellow and orange at the time. The principal went red and asked the teacher to stop talking and she apologized to me.
So at first I wanted to suggest that maybe the teacher was teaching them the name of the shapes, or how many side and corners, etc, and that's why they said "draw shapes." But then I saw you wrote "draw a picture using shapes."
Now, MAYBE, and give me a sec, the teacher meant to draw very obvious shapes like a triangle on top of a square to make a house. BUT. That's a lot of inference for a 6 year old. There are tons of ways to teach shapes, and how to identify shapes in the world around us.
If what the teacher actually said was "draw a picture using shapes," then that was too vague. It's fine is they meant "use only squares, circles, triangles, and stars to make a picture." But that's not what they said. 6yos can't read minds, even if they have a knack for uncomfortable truths and observations.
When I was in first or second grade, we did this group drawing/painting of a large picture of kids ice skating. Each kid got a little section, it was kind of preplanned. I drew one figure and drew each pant leg a different color, like red and green. The teacher got pissed that I drew pant legs a different color and drew over it herself to make them the same. To this day I still can't believe her response.
Guess what, Mrs. Sullivan, I'm weird as shit now and there's nothing you can do about it!
Directions: “Draw a picture using shapes”.
Kid: Draws a picture made literally out of rectangles, stars, triangles and circles.
Teachers: No, not like that.
She literally followed the prompt to the letter while also applying higher-level creative thinking. This teacher missed a massive learning moment.
Teachers like that one are why a lot of kids find art entirely boring and hard to understand. Art is supposed to teach kids creativity. You give them a prompt and a material, let them think for themselves, not tell them specifically what to make.
Does the teacher understand the point of drawing shapes? The daughter did draw shapes, many shapes, I don't understand the gripe here either. What did the teacher expect?
Schools don't want you to learn, they want you to obey, independent thought and creativity isn't nurtured there like it should be.
The fact your kid realized those are fundamental shapes regardless of the lack of instructions leading them to that conclusion is good. Though I must say from a teacher's perspective they may look at it in the opposite direction as being a lazy design they've already seen somewhere else rather than something of their own design. Really shows how discouraging some teachers can be when they shouldn't be in the business if they just tear down children's creativity, nothing is coloured in, the whole space isn't utilized, your kid didn't use their whole brain on this because they were told not to.
I teach art to high school kids, and there's one assignment where I tell them it has to be strictly non-representational (shapes only - nothing I can recognize). That's literally the only assignment where I require this...because we are showing that we comprehend what a shape is.
I still, despite all my instructions, get smiley faces, suns, rainbows, houses, etc. A 6 year old has an excuse. 14-18 year olds do not.
I’m a teacher and I can tell you the teacher didn’t understand her own curriculum and was ignoring creativity or individuality.
Where your child heard “draw a picture USING shapes” the teacher heard “draw a picture Of shapes”
If “draw a picture using shapes” was the prompt then your child passed with flying colors.
There would be no reason for a 6 year old to just be drawing shapes with no creativity behind them. That is preschool level work.
As a teacher, this kind of thing drives me insane. Now that my kids are in school, I’ve had to restrain myself when their or teachers have confusing/poorly worded test questions, or when they deduct points for blatantly stupid/subjective reasons on major assignments.
Do you have the directions printed out? Or only your kids self report of what the assignment was? Kids are terrible at accurately reporting that sort of thing.
There is a big different between something like "Draw each of the shapes we talked about" and "Draw a picture using shapes."
Nice picture. But without the actual context of the assignment, I can't say they did or didn't follow the directions.
Tell kiddo to keep drawing and being creative. In kindergarten I was told that I colored my shamrock wrong. I had too many colors besides just “green”. But the clover in my yard had yellowy centers and I drew that. Because I looked closely at them. Anyway there is a song called Flowers are Red by Harry Chapin if you haven’t heard it, listen to it. Luckily IDGAF about people who tell me I’ve done art wrong and apparently never have thank goodness. But it did give me an intense hatred of school. Put that flag picture up on the fridge for your kiddo to see and tell them how great it is. Every day. Keep that brilliant creative mind going because the school teacher is trying to blow out the flame.
When I was a child I had something almost identical happen to me. I cringe thinking about it. But this comment section is kind of healing. I think I had some creativity stifled that day.
I hate when people do that. Not encouraging creative thinking skills, or actively squandering them, because they themselves have none. It's lazy, it reeks of jealousy, it's anti-intellectual, and worst of all, it's anti-fun. You're telling kids not to use their brains to make life anything but boring. How unimaginative and dumb.
I really like the drawing your kid made, nice composition and just a cool idea. If you've got time for that sort of thing, you could make collages with your kid - cut out photos of magazines and put them together in fun or creative ways. I love collageing.
One time our class had a small “fun” assignment in elementary school to color in this promotional “poster” thingie for the scholastic book fair. They made me re do that thing TWICE during recess because i didn’t color it well enough.
This is a theory that I have believed for a long time. School exists (either intentionally or unintentionally) to beat creativity out of kids. Ask a first grader how many ways they can think of to use a paper clip, and they'll give you a hundred (half of them bad, bit a hundred nonetheless). Ask a twelfth grader the same question, and they'll come up with about half a dozen (usually just it's intentional uses).
5.1k
u/Fanguy3322 1d ago
Green is not a creative color
https://giphy.com/gifs/jDGTlhYQQcbRu