A sixth grade science teacher asked each of her students to draw Mickey Mouse from memory. This poster is full of the results. Click to enlarge.
The Mickey Mouse assignment was part of a lesson about water. It was a brilliantly sneaky way to get kids to remember the shape of H2O molecules.
With so much variance, I couldn’t resist tallying a few morphological statistics on the set. Here’s what I counted:
- Total drawings: 97
- Round face: 97
- Has two ears: 97
- A nose: 82
- Ear canals: 46
- Open mouth: 40
- Solid black ears: 16
- Baring teeth: 13 (one with fangs)
- Expresses doubt or apologizes for drawing ability: 12
- Eyebrows: 9 (including the mickey with just one)
- Depicts a body: 7
- Unhappy mickey: 5
- Eyelids: 4
- Distinct iris and pupil: 4
- Whiskers: 3 (not counting the mustachioed mickey)
- Bowtie: 3
- Eye lashes: 1
- Suspenders: 1
- Mickey shown with never-before-seen child: 1
This is one of my favorites:
Actually, I am glad you blogged this, since now I can link it to my friends and spread the joy that it once brought me… Your interpretation of this poster’s conception is quite close.… For days, we had used Mickey as an anchoring visual of covalent bonding between the 2 smaller, yet identical hydrogen atoms to the larger, single oxygen atom. They saw no less than 20 pictures/sketches of Mickey. Every kid is familiar with this American icon.
YET – when they were asked to draw the character using pure recall, most were seized with a sudden realization that they had no idea what the Mouse looked like beyond the 2 ears and a head. (The request was embedded in the instructions to the test…. the kids only saw it if they READ THE INSTRUCTIONS… which is why only 97 out of 116 drew anything at all!),
Despite the initial pseudo-panic, the 2 extra credit points were enough to overcome any artistic self-flagellation. The resulting images were so amusing; I had to post them on my classroom door, much to the chagrin & amusement of class members. Thankfully – anonymity was respected – lol! (You should see when I ask them to draw camels… or llamas… or rhinoceroses!!!!) A teacher has to entertain herself somehow while grading papers!
PS – I thoroughly enjoyed the stats.