Statement 27

I ask students to draw a line. They pull out a paper and pen and make a line. I give them an F. How does one go from ‘drawing a line’ to putting a line on a piece of paper? If a student had taken her desk and scrapped it along the floor, well that would be a B+. If a student took the pencil and kept drawing over the desk to the floor to the window up the glass around the room and out the door into the yard,… maybe a A-. This only goes to show that when I ask students to draw a line, they already know the answer. They assume that I know the answer.  Students often fail to see how thought and creativity have been mechanized, standardized, formatted and flattened. (But this is a situation that applies to all even to me). To draw a line is in fact a (glorious) impossibility.