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Originally Posted by flargen50
Do you want me to look at them and tell them that our robot lost because the other teams were just way better than us and all of their hard work and pain wasn't good enough? Sometimes to keep a group of kids to not just quit out of anger you have to console them. Sometimes that means telling them that those other teams were a bunch of mentor bots just to keep the peace.
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Originally Posted by flargen507
For those of you who are angry about the way I handled the situation, please let me know how you think I should handle it, and I will take it under serious consideration.
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Don't lie to your students. Your robot lost because the other teams WERE better than you and your team's work wasn't good enough. Full stop.
That sucks, but that's how it goes sometimes. You are doing the kids on your team a tremendous disservice by lying to them and you're minimizing the hard work of others at the same time. This is a lousy attitude.
We're a good team and we had a bad season. I had to deal with some pretty upset kids after things ended for us at our second event, but I did the best I could to explain that we still accomplished a lot of good and the only reason we didn't go further and do better was because we got some things wrong. It was our fault.
These kids are a few years away from living and working in a real world where nobody is going to lie to them to protect their feelings and, sometimes, no matter how hard they work at something, someone is going to do it better. When we lose; when we have a bad time at things on the field, we can choose to blame that on others or we can use that experience to teach our students to understand what went wrong and to use that knowledge in the future to make things for us and for others better than they are today.