“In case of an actual lockdown, I have these poles in the Crayola storage box so we can look menacing and make the intruder say ‘Oh I’m not messing with them.”
  The entire class shared a round of soft snickering as the average looking Mr. Conrad walked around the room, giving us a tour of his slightly cluttered art room.  He walked to the front of the class with a small smile and sat down on the wooden table in his room.  Behind him are paintings of Scream, The Persistence of Memory, and a young version of The Old Guitarist.
  “Is that real?” A curious student asked as he pointed to the Scream painting.
  Mr. Conrad took a look behind him and shook his head.
  “No, but I did paint it myself,” he said with a hint of pride.
  The paintings scaling behind him looked exactly like the real thing.  If we could, all of our jaws would be on the floor.  This man can paint, and not just a little cabin in the woods or anything, but complex works of art that’s been famous for hundreds of years.
  “Moving on to school work, every week there’s a drawing assignment for you.  Now I’m not grading on how artistic you are, but on how hard you try,” Mr. Conrad said and moved onto our first lesson, history.
  Several classes passed and we get all the history out of the way.  We ended up learning about motion in paintings and pictures.  We have to show the illusion of motion with paintings.  With a little sigh I end up drawing chibi again, bored out of my mind.
  “The reason why you draw anime stuff is because that’s all you see,” he said matter of factly.
  “Hm, I never thought of that,” I muttered and looked at my colored in picture.
  As I look back on what I did for the three years in that class, I realized how much Mr. Conrad inspired me to keep drawing.  A smile spread across my face when he asked me to hand me one of my pictures to him.  One of my pictures is now sitting on his ceiling, my work!  How cool is that?  It brings a certain warmth in my heart to know that someone appreciates my art work and hung it up for others to see.  Because of this bliss, I want Mr. Conrad to be educator of the year.