A Whole New Mind - Design

The opening of chapter four - “How many artists are there in the room?” (68). As school children advanced to higher grades, fewer of the children raised their hands.

“The kids just looked around to see if anybody in the class would admit to what they’d now learned was deviant behavior.” (69).

Here is my most vivid memory from the seventh grade. The school district that I attended had five elementary schools located in different areas. After the sixth grade, the five schools were combined for Junior High School for 7th to 9th grades.

In my new school, I didn’t know any of the other girls in my class; however, there were five boys from Washington Gladden in my class.

Early in the year during art class, one of our projects was to make a Paper Mache animal. I was creating my favorite animal, a horse. It wasn’t just an ordinary horse; it was a Merry-Go-Round horse. I began painting it yellow with plans to decorate it with bright colors of blue, green, purple … when one of the girls in the class approached me and asked me why I wasn’t painting the horse “brown". I replied, “well, it’s a merry-go-round horse”. Tammy immediately demanded that I paint it “brown”. I replied, “it’s my horse and I want to paint it yellow.” Tammy responded, “do you want to fight about it?” It turned out that Tammy was a bully and rallied eleven of the other twelve girls in the class to force me to paint my horse the color she wanted (only one girl in the class didn’t join her gang to beat me up). Luckily for me the five boys from my school and a girl named Melinda, whom I’d never met before, came to my rescue. (Added information: I was the smallest, shortest child in the class.) The group of girls ended up in the Vice Principal’s Office and had to stay after school for detention.

The others could not stifle my creativity - I went on to finish painting my merry-go-round horse with bright colored paints.