Rohan: Who or what was your inspiration to pursue a career in education?

Mr. Weaver: I would say probably a couple of key teachers in my life. My Grade 6 teacher and my Grade 7 teacher, but then most of all would probably be my Grade 10 Science teacher because at that time I wasn't sure what I wanted to study. Then I took Science 10 and had a young teacher there who was also our basketball coach, and he was super engaging and exciting. I just loved working with him and I went on eventually to manage the basketball team behind the scenes and worked a lot with this guy as the head coach. He also taught me Biology 12 and that ended up being my university major. At that time, like a lot of people, I thought I would go into medicine, but I ended up not, obviously, and ended up switching to education and a lot of that was because of when I thought back to that guy and how much I learned from him and loved working with him.

Rohan: So you were on the basketball team?

Mr. Weaver: I wasn't good enough but I always loved basketball and watching our teams play. I always call myself the "last cut." But one of my exciting moments in graduation, because I was mostly an academic guy, was that instead of getting an academic award, I got an award for my outstanding contribution to the sport of basketball. I felt super proud about that because I always loved basketball. 

Rohan: So were you an alumni from here or…?

Mr. Weaver: Sorry, no this was at STM.

Rohan: I see. Did you play any musical instruments or were you not really in that field?

Mr. Weaver: Nope, there is no musical talent within me. I just have music appreciation plus the old recorder I got back in Grade 6. We all suffered through that.

Rohan: Do you have any plans for VC in the next 5 or 10 years or so?

Mr. Weaver: Another good question! Yeah, lots of plans and it's not just my plans. It's [the school's] strategic plan. I would say that what is happening right now is that we have finished the buildings, so now we are shifting our focus onto what is happening in your classrooms, which has been good. But we think it can be even better and more exciting. We are looking at deeper transformational learning so you will see more experiential hands-on learning, going out on field trips, being connected with careers, and all sorts of ideas around that.

Rohan: So will that be related to the proficiency scale in the Middle School?

Mr. Weaver: The proficiency scale is how we measure it, so it is related in that way. We shifted to the proficiency scale because we didn't want people to worry about the numbers; we wanted people to worry about the learning. When I went to school, there was a lot of time spent on worksheets or pretty standard seatwork which was not very engaging. We learned some content, but we just learned how to do a test over and over again. So we want you guys to have an experience here sort of like… band, Faith in Action, or the play. Very intense experiences [that can] change you as a human being. We want our classrooms to be like that.

Rohan: On a different note, with the development of artificial intelligence in the past few months, do you think jobs like teaching will be under threat?

Mr. Weaver: That's a good question. It depends on what the job of teaching is to be. If the job of teaching is to only pass on information from me to you then, sure, we can easily get artificial intelligence to do that, probably more rapidly, more efficiently, all those things. But we know what education is about. It's much deeper than that; it's not just about passing on information. That's why we talk about competencies, which are skills and knowledge combined, to be different and be able to do things differently.

Rohan: I also find that when teachers give interesting or creative assignments, it helps me to understand the concepts better rather than just giving me a worksheet.

Mr. Weaver: That's right, that's more engaging. Besides that, never mind the academic thing, what I think makes VC great is that we don't just care about you guys as students, we care about you guys as human beings. I don't see how AI can help you become a better human being in the same way, you know, Mr. Shams or Mr. Povey or Mr. O'Donnell can. They have a personal relationship with you because they help you understand right from wrong, make the right decisions, and help each other out. You benefit from all those kinds of things.

Mattia: On a related note, how do you think AI's advancements will impact the students at VC?

Mr. Weaver: We were talking about that actually; we were looking at having a few of our teachers make a task force that will explore the benefits of it. We met already about it, and basically what we are saying about it right now is kind of a "time out". What we are saying is to pause it, not ban it. You can play with it if you want to, but what is interesting is the conversation around if ChatGPT and other AI help you guys learn things. For example, if you are stuck on ideas for writing things then you can use ChatGPT to generate a bunch of ideas as a starting point. That's kind of tricky because…are the ideas even yours, or is it ChatGPT? So, I can see it changing, but I just don't see where it's changing to, and a big part of that is because AI is evolving so rapidly and even what we have today is version 4 of ChatGPT. It just keeps evolving and changing, so it will definitely evolve and change things quite significantly, but I think we have to be careful a little bit in how we use it. I think it could be something that will change a lot about how education works. 

Rohan: Would you agree on using the core competencies and proficiency scale as opposed to percentages?

Mr. Weaver: I would agree.

Rohan: Because I know a lot of people that don't.

Mr. Weaver: Why don't they?

Rohan: They like to measure how good they are in a subject based on their percent, knowing a definite number rather than something out of four. But…it isn't even "out of" 4.

Mr. Weaver: It's not out of 4, I'm glad you know that. No, I hear you and I grew up in that system and worked in that system before. 13 years too, so I get it, but something you said there was significant. You said a 'definite' number, and that's the whole thing; it's not a definite number. We are sort of lying to ourselves when we say that you get 94 and you get 95. Is there a difference between a 94 and a 95? Not really. It just shows how well you wrote a test or how well we think you did on an essay, and it doesn't help you, it distracts you from the learning. 

Rohan: Yeah, I feel like a lot of kids say they think it's unfair if the categories are kind of big. If 80% of people fall into 3 categories then like, they don't want to be average.

Mr. Weaver: It's unmotivating?

Rohan: Yeah, it's unmotivating sometimes.

Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I get that, but part of the problem with how the old system works, which we still use in the senior school because we have to, is that it's based on comparing to each other when really education is really about comparing to yourself. You come in, you don't have the skills, you leave, you have the skills - that's why frankly it's good that a lot of people are in the proficiency area. That's where we want you to get to.

Mattia: Students often complain about not being able to use their own devices, such as personal computers and phones, and with the removal of the VC BYOD Wi-Fi network, there has been disagreement among the students about whether the "off and away" policy is beneficial to their learning. Do you believe that, based on past years, these policies that restrict phone usage have been beneficial or not?

Mr. Weaver: We did bring in BYOD initially. The reason that we had BYOD is that not everybody had a Chromebook. We were waiting for everybody to have a Chromebook. I know from a student point of view, you might think that we are trying to control you and control what you are looking at, and that's true to a true degree - we don't want people to be using their devices to go off and do things that they shouldn't be doing when they should be learning. You can probably understand that, right? We want your devices to be for learning, not for entertainment in class when our teacher might be boring to you or something like that. The other thing we do about devices is cell phones being "off and away". This is one of the best things we do at this school, and I hear from other schools complimenting our school on that. I know we are not perfect at it, and that's intentional because we don't want to be the police and throw people into detention all the time for accidentally taking out their phones. But we know that it is really important for your phones to be away, and talk to each other, particularly after the pandemic where you guys were trapped in your house for two years. We know how important it is for you to be a community.

Mattia: On a different note, you said that you were an alumnus from STM, and I'm sure you worked other jobs in the past, but what inspired you to apply for and get a job at VC?

Mr. Weaver: Like I said I was a science guy, I was going to go into medicine… as I said before - not boasting - I was good academically in high school, and good academically in university. I was getting the highest marks compared to most of my friends, but I applied to get into medical school at UBC and didn't get in the first time. It was the first time in my life that I'd been unsuccessful and failed at something, so I didn't know what to do. I was super frustrated. I always wanted to get into medicine so I could go off and save the world through medicine, so I signed up for a program at UBC where you could go to a remote country in Africa called Malawi. I flew there and taught science there in a school for two years. By coincidence, the school was a Catholic school. It was an all-girls school and I loved it. I loved teaching science there. It was super satisfying. There were 50 kids in every class and a lot of them couldn't speak English properly, but they would be there because they were hoping to get ahead in life to save their families, so it was super gratifying.

I did that for two years, then I came back here and thought I would stick with education, so I did more studies at UBC and then I taught in the Richmond school district for a few years. Again I got bored being around here, so I went to Hong Kong. I taught in Hong Kong for 6 years… got married and had two kids, and then said we wanted them to be Canadian. So we went back to Canada. 

First I went to a boarding school in Ontario. It was in Oldcastle. It was really fun. The cool thing about teaching is that you can work in all sorts of places. So I did that for a couple of years and then I got recruited to go to a school called Southridge, which is in White Rock, and I was there for 10 years. They brought me there so I could bring international service to their schools. I loved it for 10 years, but then I was the assistant principal in the school there and I was getting a bit restless. A job came up here for an assistant principal in charge of the senior school, so I applied with Mr. Bevacqua and he said, "Yeah, come on over!" That's what brought me here. It was the first time that I was teaching in a Catholic school since I'd been in Africa in the 90s, so it was pretty cool. 

Rohan: That was quite an incredible life. It's crazy just traveling everywhere.

Mr. Weaver: Yes, I love traveling.

Mattia: On a similar note, how does VC as a school community relate to the other schools? How different are they?

Mr. Weaver: I was talking to another principal recently and I was saying to him that… I don't want to be anywhere else. It's the best school. That's how I feel about VC. I enjoy this community. It's different, but while I'm at VC, to me, it's the best. I would say it's different from Southridge where the school selects academically so it has, unlike here, very tough entry exams. You have to be over a certain level to get in. Smaller classes, and they are co-ed. It was a fun school to teach at, but it was different from here. Here we have a more diversity of students, and therefore more people that we can help, which makes our job more satisfying. When you have kids that are already good, it's not that exciting when you get to school.

Rohan: What is your taste in music?

Mr. Weaver: My taste in music... My overall favourite is a band named U2; have you heard of them?

Rohan: Yeah, I have all their early records.

Mr. Weaver: But I also grew up in a time where hip hop was just emerging, so I really enjoy that, and hip hop and dance from the late 80s and early 90s sound has come back around. I would say that would be on my list. From living in Africa and Hong Kong I like upbeat international music - they are on my list too.

Mattia: How was it like being principal and taking on this big leadership role during COVID?

Mr. Weaver: That was interesting. The joke was that if you can learn to be a principal in that craziness then everything else will be easier, but it's always different. It was tough, but in many ways, I would say the good side of it was that when you are in a crisis, that's when people come together the most, and I think that was true in VC when people felt like we can do this together. We don't know when it is going to end but we will keep being as safe as possible and take care of each other and have each other's back. It was pretty magical in that way. But it was a lot of work to find all the different ways to manage things.

Rohan: Yeah, I did not like the wristbands.

Mr. Weaver: Yea, we tried the wristbands, we tried that. We tried different things like the plastic screens on the desks and all the spacing out. I guess you guys had full classes, not half classes.

Rohan: No, we were in Grade 8.

Mr. Weaver: Grade 8 was full, pretty normal. It was terrible for the senior school. You wouldn't see half your friends for the whole year. They were in a different learning group.

Rohan: Yea, I had a glimpse of that. Was it really small classes or, like…?

Mr. Weaver: Super small classes. So right now, when you go into the senior school, it's pretty loud, but back then it was like a ghost town. Because it was half the people, half the people were way more serious - almost sad because we split every class in half. So we would teach half your class one day and then the next day. We would teach the other half the same stuff but those two halves will never mix the whole year so they would not see each other from September to June.

Rohan: So would the groups go to school every day?

Mr. Weaver: No, no, every second day. First, it was only Grades 10, 11, and 12 like that. But we were very scared that when anyone got sick it would spread through the school. The first four cases were all in Grade 9, so we said Grade 9 is the place the disease is spreading, and we took Grade 9 and also split them in half so they could only come to school every second day as well. So that was a crazy time for sure.

Rohan: I do remember Grade 9 feeling a lot more lively. Do you prefer cats or dogs?

Mr. Weaver: Definitely dogs. I'm a dog guy; I have two dogs .