Draw From This Experience

I was always a pretty smart cookie when it came to schoolwork, taken honors classes through my grade school years, and even had a couple advanced classes through high school. In my sophomore English class, I had a teacher that both loved and hated how I worked. As I was a proficient and independent reader, and often helped other students with their own work, one would assume there would be no problem with me. Unfortunately, the teacher didn’t agree with my extracurricular reading and drawing when I was done with the assigned work in class.

She gave us a packet of grammar work pages that you’d find in a third grade classroom, as evidenced in plain, bold print on the bottom. She spent about twenty-five minutes reading out the instructions, and I took that time to zip through the packet, seeing as it was basic English. By the time she allowed everyone else to get to work uninterrupted, I was done and decided to draw for the remainder of the class. She took this chance to come up to me, with what I could only assume was the most disapproving look she could muster.

“I’m going to call your father and tell him what you do in class all day!”

Without missing a beat, continuing my sketch with my right hand, I held up the work packet with my left, leafing through the eight pages of children’s work, showing all the complete pages, not a single blank left. With the packet back on my desk, she just walked away and didn’t say another thing to me the entire class.

She never called home, either.