Outhouses, Airplanes, & Solar Systems

For the sole reason that she is the most anal-retentive woman I have ever met, our Government & Economics teacher, who we've dubbed WhiteWench because her name is Ms. White and she's a wench, demands that we make symbols to help us remember things. She refused to listen to my pleas to spear me the pain of demonstrating my sub-par art skills, and as a result I bring you this blasphemous article.

Update: WhiteWench quit shortly after this article was written and was promptly replaced by, at last count, 9 different teachers in 3 months. Also, I met an even more anal retentive teacher. I love High School :)

For example, here's the famous Greek Philosopher Plato, as seen through my artistic vision:

Plato may be somewhat apparent to you as a plate and an "O", but things rapidly declined. Here's Plato's pupil Aristotle:

What I was going for there was a wrist and a toddler. Clearly I failed and created some unholy caterpillar-human hybrid. Perhaps the most recognizable of the bunch is English philosopher John Locke, pictured below.

To me, that clearly looks like an outhouse and a lock, but several people believed the outhouse to be an icee, despite the fact that icees do not have doors. Things continue to go downhill with my interpretation of Sir William Blackstone:

The "black stone" is reasonable enough, and possibly the stick-figure, but why I gave him antennae to signify that he'd been knighted is still a mystery. Mystery is very much a part of our next victim, Mary Wollstonecraft.

OK, how Mary Wollstonecraft ended up as an anchor, ant-farm and starfish is not that hard to follow. Originally I was going to draw a stick-figure with breasts, to signify that she was indeed a woman, but her legs went bad and she was doomed to a life of being oppressed by overbearing male sailors. The ant-farm in the middle was meant to be a stone wall, or wollstone. The starfish was created from the vague images in my mind of what a craft should look like. At this point you really should be afraid to see the next philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rosseau.

I actually believed for a moment that drawing Jean-Jacques Rosseau would be easy. A pair of jeans, a jock-strap, and a.........Rosseau? I had no idea what a Rosseau would look like, so I drew a happy-looking pyramid that somehow gained a single eye.

Baron de Montesquieu, pictured above, was originally known as Charles-Louis de Secondat. I figured his title would be easier to draw than his birth-name. The Red Baron, a calendar with the third day of an unknown month, and a skewed guy named Monty. The last one may have been a bit of a stretch, but I was scared by the prospect of "de Secondat".

Above is solar system, airplane, violin, or in English: Niccolo Machiavelli. A classmate suggested I draw a coin and an "O", which would have been fine had I not already drawn the solar system. The airplane there is supposed to symbolize "Mach", while the violin is "Velli".

So what have we learned from all this?

I should never be allowed to draw again

Outhouses and Icees can indeed be confused.

Absolutely nothing about influential philosophers.