Amongst the endless grid copying, papier mâché body parts and the big hitters, the one unifying thing that people seemed to do in art at school was a pencil drawing of a shoe. I recall two or three being brilliantly exact, photo-realist masterpieces, some half-decent to middling efforts, a few were more joyously cartoonish whilst others merely resembled dead slugs or something else that was clearly not a shoe. We put them all up on the wall and had a good laugh at the really bad ones, whilst the teacher stood back, desperately scanning for any glimmers of talent. I guess that the exercise was to try and represent something that you knew inside out on a crappy sheet of A4 - a non-art object as a symbol of your way of thinking.