My brother followed me to high school. The year I graduated he became a freshman the next September. I was the STEM guy. Math, science, all that came easily to me and I got 1500 on the SAT (perfect was 1600 back then). My brother was and is the artist and mechanic of the family. I draft, he does watercolors and oils. I could draft plans and dream up things but he would have to build them. He got tired of hearing how smart I was and how he should study harder to be more like me. I don’t blame him. He was and is a mechanical genius while I was Mensa. Together we are formidable, but without practical knowledge of mechanics and carpentry all the blueprints in the world are useless. I thought up how we could make our own black powder rifles, but my brother figured out how to use tooling to actually make them. For taxes, computer problems and other STEM things he comes to me. When my car is giving me fits or I need the deck repaired I go to him. Neither of us is superior to the other, but try convincing public school teachers of that little fact. The better students do on standardized tests, the better teachers look on paper. So they are interested in developing STEM students and the artistic and mechanical students get far less attention.
My brother followed me to high school. The year I graduated he became a freshman the next September. I was the STEM guy. Math, science, all that came easily to me and I got 1500 on the SAT (perfect was 1600 back then). My brother was and is the artist and mechanic of the family. I draft, he does watercolors and oils. I could draft plans and dream up things but he would have to build them. He got tired of hearing how smart I was and how he should study harder to be more like me. I don’t blame him. He was and is a mechanical genius while I was Mensa. Together we are formidable, but without practical knowledge of mechanics and carpentry all the blueprints in the world are useless. I thought up how we could make our own black powder rifles, but my brother figured out how to use tooling to actually make them. For taxes, computer problems and other STEM things he comes to me. When my car is giving me fits or I need the deck repaired I go to him. Neither of us is superior to the other, but try convincing public school teachers of that little fact. The better students do on standardized tests, the better teachers look on paper. So they are interested in developing STEM students and the artistic and mechanical students get far less attention.