Artistically Gifted?

Today I wrote up a survey that I would hand out to the middle schoolers. I asked several art related questions, the answers of which I hoped would help me write my research paper. Many students struggled with the questions, which included "how important is art to you?" "what life skills are you able to learn in art class?" and "do you think art is a waste of time?". I noticed that some students didn't take the survey seriously and thought that the questions were ridiculous. They just couldn't imagine that an art class could provide a real-life skill. I read some of the survey answers and several kids said that they thought art was a waste of time because they weren't good at it. Mrs. Powers tried to tell them that it didn't work like that. There aren't people who are good at art and people who are bad at art. She then asked me, to prove a point to the students, if I was good at art before I had taken art classes. I told the students that in seventh grade my artwork looked just like the artwork of my peers. It wasn't until I really became interested in improving that things started to turn around. I would often look at other artists' drawings online to get a sense of how to draw certain things, or how certain styles worked. I have several sketchbooks at home filled with exact reproductions of other people's drawings. By practicing other people's works, I was developing my own skills. I told the students that after practice, I began to get better. Apparently my message didn't get across because they said that they believed that I had just always been good at art and they would always be bad at art.