The teachers at my school seem to think that the purpose of Arts & Crafts class is to make kids mass produce enough decorations to cover the walls of our classrooms thrice over. They pass out two or sometimes three copies of the same coloring page to each student and prod them along until each one is fully decorated. I’ve never heard kids put up such a fuss about coloring; they’d rather continue doing math work than be sent off to Arts & Crafts.

The other day, one of the teachers came into my classroom and handed me a stack of papers, each bearing the outlines of four flowers. She explained that we needed more decorations for the third floor, and even though the kids had colored at least 8 of these flowers each already, we needed another 8 from each of them. I gave her a funny look and told her that I’d do my best but I couldn’t promise I’d get a page from each kid, much less two.

Our school suffers from a serious flower deficiency

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