Let Me Just Do the Project for You

While I was student teaching in a small district in Pennsylvania, I had the great fortune of playing an unparalleled practical joke on a high school student.

I was in my fifth week of teaching in a drawing and painting class. The students were working on an assignment which was to select a word (any word), reproduce the word on drawing paper using a particular font and then to illustrate the word in some way using colored pencils. Not too difficult. Scratch that. Not at all difficult. Not even a little bit.

The students had two weeks to complete the assignment. One boy, we’ll call him Mark, decided that he did not want to work on this assignment. He sat at his desk for these two weeks with a blank piece of paper in front of him “brainstorming” as he put it. Daily encouragement could not prompt him to work.

Finally, the due date for the project rolled around. Now, it’s important that you know that after each project, I had the students fill out an evaluation sheet where questions would be answered concerning their work. Question seven on the sheet read, “What word did you select to illustrate and why?” Two minutes before the end of the class on the project’s due date, Mark placed his completed evaluation sheet on my desk.

“Mark, I have your evaluation sheet, but I didn’t see your project,” I informed him.

“I put it on your desk,” he responded confidently.

“Alright. I’ll look again,” I said as the bell rang, and he left the class.

I returned to my desk, double-checked and searched the floor. His project was not there. I checked the storage shelf where the students kept their assignments and found that Mark had not completed the assignment. In fact, his paper was still on the shelf, not even started with his name written on the back.

I checked the evaluation sheet that he had turned in. It was completed as though he had done the project including an answer to question seven which asked what word he had selected and why. According to this evaluation sheet Mark had chosen “Friend” as his word to illustrate.

Suddenly, I was struck like a bolt of lightning to the brain with an idea so brilliant that few could match it. I would do the assignment for him. Not only would I do the assignment for him, but I would do the WORST JOB on it imaginable.

So I did. The word itself was done terribly, no straight lines, crooked letters and set on an angle. The color scheme was disgusting, Purples, oranges, browns, grays, and blues. One letter was in spots another outlined in black. The illustrations were so ugly, all done drawn with my left hand worse than a preschooler. I did the worst job on it that I could. I was striving for crap. Then I hung it on display in the hall with the others.

The following day, once I started the students on their next assignment, I called Mark out into the hall. I showed him the project.

“Mark, are you sure you want to hand this in for a grade? Because I know you can do a better job than this.” I pointed to the work hanging in the hall.

Confusion covered his face.

“I mean, I saw what you did on your last assignment,” I continued “and you did a decent job. I know you can do better than this.”

He fumbled for words. “This isn’t my assignment.”

“What do you mean?” I asked perplexed.

“That’s my word, but this isn’t my project,” he said.

“But this is the one that was on my desk. Isn’t this the word you selected? Didn’t you illustrate ‘Friend’?” I asked him.

“Yes, I picked ‘Friend’, but…”

“Yeah, cause it has your name on the back in your handwriting,” I said to him showing him his name on the back in his own writing. He could not understand. “So you’re telling me that this isn’t your project, but it has your name on it?” I ask.

“Yeah. I don’t get it,” he said.

“Weird.” I say shaking my head feigning confusion myself. “Why don’t you go ask one of your friends if they did this project as a joke and then put it on my desk with your name on it. Because I don’t know where your actual project could be,” I say.

“Well, I can do another one,” he says as confused as ever.

“Well, if you already did it once, you don’t have to do it again. I don’t want you to have to do the entire thing over again. That wouldn’t make sense. Since you already worked so hard on it.” I think I made my point.

He went back into the classroom and redid the project for partial credit.