THE ULTIMATE
COPY-PENALTY BOOK
ESSAY
WRITING
the ultimate
copy-penalty book
2​023/12/23
I like drawing, when I was young, people around me often considered me as talented in arts and painting. Though I weren’t study professionally, like those who choose a path to become an artist. I often doodle in a number of textbooks, test paper, homework, even on walls and desks.
In the time of my elementary days, there are seldom electronic portable entertainment devices available to students, if you are wealthy enough to own a portable gaming device, confiscated is the guarantee result if you dare enough to play in classes. Novels are considered to be forbidden as well, so the only entertainment viable in class without facing consequence are doodling on the textbook.
The limitation of the class also shaped the artform of my style. Because It’s hard to bring out a complete set of water color paint to evade teacher’s eyesight, my only tool of creation is my automatic pencil: 0.5mm, HB, with a crappy eraser and a plastic ruler. This also resulted me losing the ability to create colorful paintings, at least with mixed result.
Sometimes I will use ball pen such as blue and black to create. However, the challenge of the ball pen paint is to create different shades of shadow. Hence, my painting mostly stuck with black and white.
​
In high school, I’ve met a stubborn old English teacher at my second grade. She is really the type of those “punisher” teacher in your elementary days. Everyday she will quiz us various vocabulary and phrases, if we can’t score 80, we need to do a re-test after school, and hand-write each vocabulary ten times as a punishment. Each time you failed a re-test, ten times are added as your homework. If we scored under 70, it’s a brutally 20 times.
I felt that these types of punishments are too humiliating for a highschooler, rather than follow the easy and correct path: study hard and get good grades to avoid all these hassles, I decided that I must find a way to deter my tyrannical teacher. Hence, one of my greatest creation was born.
The project is called: the ultimate copy-penalty book. Most students written these penalties in a random scribble way to express their anger. My final goal is to make teacher beg me not to write vocabulary copies anymore. So, I came up with an idea of writing my penalties at a most elaborate, creative way as possible.
First, I try to imitate different fonts on the computer. This led me stumble to the world of typography, there are so many different ways that 26 alphabets can arrange and transform, and the results are fascinating. I once written a page looked like directly printed out from a computer, and my classmates are so fascinated by the result. They still can’t comprehend the fact that someone can actually have some joy throughout the vocabulary penalty copies.
Sadly, my midterm does not reflect the efforts from my elaborate drawings. Though my teacher enjoyed watching my works on the penalty book, there are no signs of her backing down on the amount of punishments I received.
After each midterm, our teacher will sum up a huge number of penalties to those who failed at English tests. Since I spent most of my time writing/drawing my deliciated words, I have no time to study anything else. So, I receive a staggering 250*50 words as my punishment for getting last on my midterm.
When I see other students miserably writing those huge punishments day and night to meet the deadline, I decided to come up some new methods to counteract my sadistic teacher.
Since my teacher is an elderly woman, I decided to deliver her the same pain as me. I decided to fill all 250*50 words on a single page! Good luck counting out the total word count with your elderly eyesight!
To test my limit of how small a character I could write, and how many words I could fill on a single page. I brought an extremely thin needle pen for the job. The tip of the pen is so narrow at an unbelievable 0.03mm, which makes it extremely fragile from any force pushing downwards towards the paper. Hence, I have to write in an extremely precise angle to be small enough and not damaged the pen at the same time.
Furthermore, in order to write characters that smaller than a grain of rice, I had to place my face directly on my book to even see what I’m writing at the first place. By several practices, I’ve managed to fill 15 lines within the one-centimeter width line suggested by the textbook.
I run out of my patience around 168*50 words, so I decided to handed out to my teacher anyways. Since there are no ways she could noticed any difference by her naked eye. To ridicule her even more, I even provided her a magnifying glass to look into my grand epic.
Out of my surprise, she simply asked a student to check out my words instead of checking herself. The student is amazed that someone can write so small, and consistent at this level of detail, for a total of 250*50 words.
Luckily, my classmate run out of patient to make sure that I fully meet the quota. The plan of ruining my teacher’s eyesight failed miserably. It turns out, when the next health examination comes, I gained short sighted around 50 points more on my eyes. And she didn’t even count a single word!
Further down the semester, I still received lots of words for me to write. I made a goal of myself to create the most amazing penalty copy book in the history of punishments. I kept writing on and on, during English classes, at after school club, till late at night. I tried out various artforms, different fonts, three-dimensional effects on words, and even created full-page art piece with themes.
At the end of the semester, my teacher finally gave up on giving me new punishments, because any new punishments are adding fuel in the fire on my creativity. She just begged me to just passed the re-test and go home. But I have done too far to back down, I insisted on finishing my grand epic-the ultimate penalty copy book as my personal life achievement.
At the last page, I drew a detailed sketch of my teacher to honor the sole reason that I created this epic book. It turns out, this is her last year teaching before she retired.
Before graduation, she asked me if I could give her my masterpiece as a memento. I refused, I thought: hell no, this whole mess were caused by you! I’m not giving up all my tears and blood to the one inflicts all the pain on me at the first place!
However, I was kind enough to provide her a copy of my book. To my surprise, she also copied my copy, and send it to other English teachers at my high school as well.
Sadly, those English teachers realized the great results of giving writing punishments to ace student’s grades. So, for those juniors, the brutal punishments are here to stay.
What’s worse, if those students cry out from the amount of words they receive from the teacher, those teachers will simply show the copies of my epic book to encourage them to write well rather than giving up. Sorry fellow junior brothers and sisters, I wasn’t intended on inflicting so much pain on you.
From the goal to deter my teacher to not write any penalty copy, I never realized my works will inflict such wide spread torment in school.
In the end, this epic work became my crown jewel in my college application resume. When I’m applying for design school, the professors were so amazed from my works, that they read it fully and passed around to everyone to witness my masterpiece during my interview.
I began to wonder: are they amazed by my ability and dedication to draw, or shocked by my poor English ability to receive such amount of punishments?
