[davidw]

1. There were no rules on what the 'plane' was supposed to look like. Creativity was encouraged and normally rewarded in this class (I liked the teacher a lot, actually, and was irked also because it was out of character for her to forbid thinking outside the box).

2. It wasn't during a unit on aerodynamics, and in any case, "the motion of air, particularly when it interacts with a moving object" is quite relevant to wads of paper, meteorites, missiles, arrows, helicopters, and various other objects that are not airplanes. It might have been a good opportunity to explore why something like my wad of paper would go farther than most planes, as well as the relative real world advantages of different things.