The Trap Is Set
The instructions seemed simple enough. In Mrs. Higgins’ mind, she envisioned thirty adorable, slightly wobbly crayon drawings that she could hang on the bulletin board—a collage of stick figures with curly hair and bright smiles. She expected the usual childhood artistic interpretation: maybe one eye bigger than the other, or floating heads without necks.
She honestly thought it would be a cute exercise in observation and a nice ego boost. After all, kids usually draw their teachers like princesses or superheroes, right? She couldn’t have been more wrong. By asking them to draw “exactly what they saw,” she had inadvertently opened a Pandora’s box of brutal, unfiltered childhood honesty. The trap was set, and she had walked right into it with a smile on her face.