Continuing Tales of the Crappy Art Teacher

The last two class periods in my Drawing I class have been an introduction to life drawing - which means we've been drawing a nude model.

The guy who usually sits next to me was there waiting with the rest of the class for the teacher to show up (and she was a full ten minutes late this time instead of the usual five). When she arrived, he had a brief, quiet conversation with her, then left. I ran into him in the hallway later on in the day, and I asked him what was up.

Turns out, the model is his next-door neighbor, someone whose family he knows pretty well. On the first day working with the model, he wasn't very comfortable with it, but didn't quite know what to do. After that class period, he talked to the model's father, who told him that she hadn't been very comfortable with the situation, either. After some discussion, he told her father that if she was modelling again the next time the class met, he would leave. She was, and he did.

The discussion he had with the teacher was him explaining the situation. Before the life drawing project, the teacher had said that if anyone wasn't comfortable with the model, they could do an alternative project for full credit. Makes sense, since you don't really go into Drawing I expecting to draw nudes; if it were Life Drawing, it would be a different story. Anyway, he explains to her that he's not comfortable with the situation, and would prefer to do something else. She says nope, if he was uncomfortable, he should have left on the first day, and he's only getting half credit for the assignment.

So the Crappy Art Teacher seems to have randomly decided that her previous statements on the subject don't apply, for some reason...and it's not as though he said, "I don't want to have to look at and draw a naked woman." It was clearly an awkward situation for both him and the model, and he resolved it in the best way he could - and yet, because the Crappy Art Teacher is a Crappy Art Teacher, he's penalized for it, I suppose just because that's the way the proverbial wind was blowing in C.A.T.'s mind that day...