Like many students today, there are a lot of girls who would love to take shop class, but again when you start looking at timetabling there are really some hard interfaces and you can't do both. This is also because we don't have a grade 13.
Having three kids go through the system, the public system, trying to just get all of the electives and everything else for science, you don't have a lot of time to take those extra ones. To me it's the co-curricular, the extracurricular activities, whether it's working in a basement, at FIRST Robotics, TechGirls Canada, wherever these kids are getting the hands-on.
I had the fortunate chance.... I was going to be going to go to a big name university, but my dad had a medical problem and we had no funding. However, that was.... I was like the lucky squirrel that found a nut. I was able to go to a co-op school, which was phenomenal because I could work, I could go to school, and it gave me a chance to try out positions I didn't know whether I wanted or not. In six weeks you can go anywhere and decide whether you like it or not. But it was that hands-on that grew my experience over five years to get a degree and get a master's.
To me whether you get that in a school setting or co-curricular, it's just phenomenal. I wish everyone had that choice.