I am shamed…

…by their scribblings.


Students in every country doodle when they’re bored. I don’t take it personally, it’s just how it is. It’s probably been going on since the dawn of time. I’m sure there were clay tablets with drawings and stick figures in the margins way back when clay tablets were cutting edge.It’s just something students do.From my memories of school, most people sucked at drawing, but you had a few good artists here and there whose notebooks got passed around and admired. But what would it have been like if everybody could draw well?
It’d be a lot like Korea.

Some days I think I’m teaching English to a bunch of out of work, midget artists. It seems like they can all draw at a level too high to be called “average.” The “average” talent here would shame most scribblers in America. (This is yet another education front we’re losing on, but I don’t think the teachers in America want to compete in this fight. They’ve got bigger fish to fry.)Here’s my favorite recent doodle. The girl who did this one made it as an illustration in her journal. She’d written about how she’d gotten into trouble and, as punishment, was going to have to stay after school one day the next week and clean her classroom.

It’s a simple little drawing, but something about it really got to me. Probably the fact that, as simple as it is, I doubt I could do it. And she’d just scribbled it off in a minute or two after she’d finished writing her journal entry.
If I was impressed by it, it’d probably piss me off.

There is a silver lining though.

They all draw the same way.

Except for the ones that are really, really good, you can’t tell one kid’s drawings from another. Must have something to do with that whole conformist thing. So they’re not all going to grow up to become the next Kim Hyung Tae. (Phenomenal artist, well known for his character design and illustration work for some game companies here.)And that’s good, because that would be just a bit too much to deal with.