Vicki Ooi, Founder and director of the Shakespeare4All charity
When I was about eight, in 1949, I drew this cow in my art class at King George's Girls School, Penang, and coloured it purple. I said I'd seen it in a dream. The teacher said, 'Nonsense, I've never seen a purple cow - you're wasting my art material. You won't be allowed to draw anything more unless you colour the cow brown.' I refused, so she slammed my knuckles with a wooden brush. I never drew after that.
To this day, I've also never been able to do anything creative on expensive paper. I write on the backs of old envelopes and scraps of paper.
There was a lot of corporal punishment in that school. I stayed there from primary into secondary. My first teacher, Miss Goh, was awful. She had a lovely jade bangle on her left arm and a heavy metal ruler in her right hand. I admired the bracelet enormously and then the ruler would come whacking down when you were looking at this fascinating jewellery.
All the time I was there, I was a bad pupil, because I was bored. If kids are bored, you should give them more challenging work and they'll thrive. My friends in art once made a life-size model of one of our classmates, and I got the girl to bring in spare clothes, so I could dress up the model and hang it from the fan. When the teacher walked in, you should have heard the scream - she thought one of her class had hung themselves.
We were given a lot of lines but I discovered that if you tied 10 pencils together, you could do 10 sets of lines
at once. Soon other kids started asking me if I could lend them lines. Then I discovered where the teachers hid the lines, so I stole those and recycled them.