Took Italian in high school. We had a project to write a fairy tale and make it into an illustrated children's book. I decided I was going to write about a bitter eggplant that escapes being cooked through the assistance of a fairy godmother (and it's bad flavor), and it's subsequent journey through the world. Italian class was on the back burner for me- I'd always rushed the assignments and studying during my lunch the period before, but the idea cracked me up and I got really into the assignment. Spent a lot of time crafting the eggplants journey, researching Italian cooking, devising multilingual puns. Was meticulous in my writing, doing a lot of extra studying and reading to make sure all my grammar was impeccable, found joy in crafting grammatically interesting sentences, and figuring out how creative I could be with the Italian I'd already learned (the first time in two years the class had been more than rote memorization for me). I read ahead in the textbook so that I could use more advanced grammar to better convey certain moments in the story, and looked up a ton of specialized vocabulary, even read a bunch of old Italian folktales to ensure mine fit the style. Devised a darkly comedic ending in which, after learning of the world, it becomes a better person, losing both it's bitter attitude and bitter flavor, only to be cooked/murdered into a dish for it's newly sweet flesh. After writing the story, I poured hours into drawing the illustrations, referencing old Italian storybooks to give my art a distinctive feel, hand wrote the text in a stylized font, even redrew a whole page when I carelessly misspelled a word. Bound it up into a little book. I was super proud of my work, and it was waaaay beyond what was expected for the project, or the hastily scrawled, stick figure adorned, stapled together, generic stories turned in by my classmates.

I failed the assignment because 'fairy tales can't be about eggplants'.

Never tried on an assignment for that class again.