During my high school career, my perspective of art education was changed when I attended a STEM focuses school that did not offer any form of art class within school hours. Up until this point, I had always loved my art classes in primary school, and enrolled in art camps in my extra time in the summer. At home I would make crafts and paint in my kitchen or build natural sculptures in the backyard. I never really questioned my opinions on art education or why I loved it because it was just always there. It wasn’t until those experiences were no longer offered to me day to day that I began to notice its impact. During my first two years of high school, I struggled to find who I was and wanted to be. I knew I was good at math and science, and was successful in my classes, but I felt no passion or understanding of my self. It wasn’t until my Junior year that I decided to clean out a room in my parent’s basement one night and start painting. I felt so much peace being able to just create with no limits. Over the year I developed that room more and more into an art studio space for myself and realized my passions and gained self awareness. Getting away from the world and into that space also helped me with my anxiety caused by my school workload, and helped me think creatively in my other classes. Through this practice however, I also learned the importance of intrinsic motivation and the originator instinct. Because all of my art was being done in my own time, based on what I wanted, I gained a lot more than I would if I was being given preset assignments in the classroom. At the time I did not know how to word that realization, but I know realize it is evidence that art should be choice-based. When art is choice based, it allows students to explore and discover in ways they could not when completing a step by step given project. In this animated piece that I created, I wanted to abstractly depict how introducing choice into a classroom where each student is seen as the same, and given the same assignment can create an inspiring environment that pushed the boundaries, and breaks the mold. This current understanding of mine influences who I want to be as a teacher. I do not want to teach my students how to “make” something, I want to teach them to “discover” something, whether it be about themselves, a material, a concept or the world. I want all art to be passionate, personal and pertinent in my classroom, and I want mistakes and failure to be celebrated just as much as successes.