I love talking to my STEM friends about homework. While they’re assigned labs and are stressed about midterms, I get to watch a film related to teaching and reflect on it. My little brother is in his second year of engineering at UBC and he can’t even leave the house, poor thing. He comes home from lectures and does homework until midnight, every weekday. His weekends are spent doing homework from morning until night. I hope it pays off one day.

As I briefly mentioned above, our task this week was to watch the film called Most Likely to Succeed. In brief, this is a documentary style film that examines a high school that has implemented different styles of education that contradict the traditional secondary classroom. I was enrolled in a program that followed this same idea of education, where we learn how to use technology and our work is project-based. I did the program back in 2016/2017 so it may have changed over the years, you can read more about it here. In my experience, most of my projects involved me cramming things together at the last minute and pulling all-nighters before exhibition day. I would tie my hair up in a disgusting bun for the week and spend every spare hour working on my creation. I would aspire to do many things for my projects but was often incapable of following through with my big ideas. My perfectionism focus also made me struggle with time-management. For instance, I remember constructing a model of a diving board that had something like a sensor which would sense when someone was about to hit it, and it could retract (or something). Unfortunately, I procrastinated this project until the last minute and was unable to complete a poster board for the display, meaning that there was a 3D model placed on a table where I stood with no visual story and nothing to draw guests in.

Attending the POL meetings with the teachers afterwards was usually a nerve-wracking experience. The criticism was difficult, especially when I knew that I hadn’t done all that I could have done for my projects. Watching Brian go through the same process that I had gone through made me nervous for him because I feared that he would be harshly criticized. Brian’s meeting went differently from mine, however. While I remember being faced with disappointment, Brian’s teacher’s acknowledged his strengths, saying, “One of the things that is special about you is that you’re a visionary person, and we do not want to hammer that out of you.” This phrase made me tear up because I can relate to Brian as a visionary person and having a teacher acknowledge this is incredibly meaningful.