When people ask me about Big Picture, and how it works, I almost always tell them that when a student is in Big Picture, they need to motivate themselves, or they will fail. When I tell them that a student will fail, I do not mean that they will have a report card with an ‘F’ or a 50% on it. I mean that they will waste their year. In school, they will be a failure. If a student cannot bring themselves to get things done without being told exactly what to do, Big Picture is not for them.
In order to succeed in this school, you have to be able to succeed outside of school; when someone who is no longer enrolled in school wakes up, they have to get themselves to work, and do work. They have to figure out what needs to be done, and how to do it. People who make money are the ones who solve problems. The closest type of work to the normal structure of school is answering phones or making fast food, where you have a list of things that you need to do over and over again. Neither field is very lucrative.
If I come into Big Picture with nothing to do, I can sit around and talk or surf the internet all day, and I won’t really be reprimanded. If I do this over and over again, I won’t have anything to show for attending school. If I have nothing to show from my time spent at school, I have wasted that quarter, semester, or year, and people will see that, which means that I will not progress. For all I can tell, a student in Big Picture can take themselves only as far as they are willing to go. People in Big Picture have the opportunity to create the most impressive things that will be made in South Burlington, or they can waste their education.