but I really needed to recount this story:
(copied and pasted from skype with minor editing cause I’m lazy)

[2/2/12 11:27:24 AM] Rachel Geiger: my color theory teacher is absolutely batshit insane
do you remember that painting I did where it was like a bowl of fruit or some shit and I had to seperate it into segments and change the color of each segment?
I sent you a picture of it

[2/2/12 11:28:53 AM] Brandon Swan: yes ma’am, I do

[2/2/12 11:29:49 AM] Rachel Geiger: in the directions, she said that we should find a large-resolution image of a painting by a famous artist, and print it out and paint directly on it
essentially, you’d be painting over the entire printed out picture, tracing it but with paint
I figured, well, I could go to the trouble of printing it out and then obscure all of it, or I could just draw it from scratch, and it would look exactly the same as a finished product anyway
the only way that you would be able to tell is because one of the sections you were supposed to just leave alone, not paint over
and I figured, well, if I paint on nice bristol instead of a printed piece of paper, it would look better overall
and the brush strokes between the panels would match each other a lot better

so instead of printing a thing out and painting over it, I drew mine from scratch, and duplicated the original painting in one of the sections,
which required extra work, and was more difficult than the rest of the piece, cause the color was not a bit subjective, I had to match exactly the original.

teacher comes over to me today while I’m working on something else and hands me the grading sheet and says “we need to talk about this”
and then tells me that I didn’t follow directions, and I ask her to explain how
it takes her a little while to get accross what it is that I did wrong, I completely didnt understand her
but it was a big deal to her that I did not print out the picture and trace it and just freehanded it myself
she said “the craftsmanship is beautiful, you did an excellent job on this piece”
and said that I did in fact match the original painting very well
but
because I did not follow her directions, she had to give me a zero on the entire assignment

so I am like UHHH WHAT
kind of loudly
in the middle of class when we were all working quietly
and then was like “I dont understand. I didnt think that me repainting it would be an issue, I did EXTRA work, to make it look nicer and more uniform”
and she explained again that I “didnt follow directions!” all matter-of-factly
I keep talking to her about it and finally she’s like “ok, what I need you to do is print out a copy of the original and bring it to me on sunday and we will discuss this”
and I’m like “fine”
and she walks away

I go back to working on my project that she had assigned earlier in class
which was an excercise in transparency, so we had to make shapes overlap each other and mix the colors where they overlapped to make it appear as though the shapes were transparent
I WAS going to do a simple three circles, like a venn diagram, but while lecturing on this before, she had encouraged us to do something more complicated, get artsy about it
so I pulled out my sketchbook and was trying to come up with ideas, finally I decided to do a jellyfish, in three layers, with the top of it one layer, the guts of it another later, and the tentacles another
and was working out the composition
when she bustled over to me a second time

and, I should point out, last class I had gotten the assignment done in 15 minutes
and she had nothing else for me to do in class
so I just drew quietly for the next hour or so
in fact, I had done the assignment so well that she was using it as an example to other students as they worked
anyway

I was sketching out the composition, and she came over again
and very, VERY sternly grabbed my arm and looked me in the eye and said “You need to use THIS CLASS to work on projects FOR THIS CLASS. This is the second time.”
and I was like “THAT IS WHAT I AM DOING RIGHT NOW”

again, kind of loudly, cause I was just so fucking taken aback by this lady
and she was like “oh, ARE YOU?” completely thinking I was making shit up
because the drawing I was doing was very complicated compared to the other students, who were doing simple abstract shapes in really flat and uninspired compositions
and I was like “YES. LOOK. this part will be green, this part will be blue, this part will be violet. they’ll intersect here, the colors will show through in the cut out sections here”
and she didnt apologize or even look like she believed me, she just said “ok, whatever” and walked away again
she came up and harassed me about shit four more times while I was working

[2/2/12 11:31:51 AM] Brandon Swan: was she buggin anyone else??

[2/2/12 11:31:53 AM] Rachel Geiger: NO
JUST ME
she made me schedule a second appointment with her
in addition to the one on sunday where I get to explain what the fuck I was doing with the painting
but another one next wednesday where I would have to bring all of my work that I’d done for the class so far for her to go over
which was standard, everyone else had to as well
but
she walked up to me with the sign in sheet and was like “you need to sign up for this” and so I grabbed a pencil and was looking over the times and trying to remember when I had classes
she gave me like 30 seconds before she repeated, louder “YOU NEED TO SIGN UP FOR THIS” again
and so I said “I’m trying to remember when I have class!” and then just picked a spot randomly and wrote my name in it so she would go away
and then she was like “you need to remember to bring your color binder”
I think it was color binder, she had some term for it
what she was trying to say, was that I needed to bring in all my assignments together for her to look at
but I didnt know thats what she meant by “color binder”
she had never SAID “color binder” in this context before, it was written somewhere ONCE in her massive syllabus
so I asked, very politely, “I’m sorry, what do you mean by color binder?”
and she just fucking glared at me
and said “read the syllabus”
and then stormed off again
she came up other times to remind me of shit she had just told me about, but they were short encounters, thankfully

and that was my morning