I had a realization that may or may not apply - but it occurred to me - do you think the reason the teacher requested no stick figures is because she sees drawing in full figures as a way of better defining the people/characters in the poems, so she sees it as an extension of more fully defining the work? If that's the case, I can somewhat understand how she's making the connection between stick figures and lack of effort. Just wondering if perhaps that was what she was actually attempting to get across, rather than a blanket assumption that a person drawing a stick figure wasn't trying.
If that was the intent, I might suggest to my ds to make a few of his drawings the way he wants to create them, and them show them to the teacher and she might see that he is really quite creative at expressing himself and retelling the story via stick figures
polarbear
ps - in case anyone is wondering where the heck I thought this up, it didn't come out of thin air. I had a flashback to a 2nd grade parent-teacher conference last fall where dd's teacher told me how proud she was of dd because she was finally filling in all the blank spaces when she colored the pictures she drew above her stories. While the teacher was raving on and on I was sitting there thinking "and why on earth does that matter?"... but then the teacher filled me in lol! For the record, I still don't think it really matters.... other than to show that dd figured out how to beat the system
