Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Hibner
Is it possible that the 6 week build season is costing you money right now? If the college teaching job is 2 nights a week, then wouldn't going to an unregulated build season allow you more time during the week so you can teach those 2 nights instead of working on FIRST? That is why I'm arguring for extending the build season, so teams can go from meeting 6 days a week to a more managable 3 or 4 days per week.
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As a person who also teaches community college night classes (and is president of our local beekeeping association, and is on my local school board), I'm not sure how I can say NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO without people understanding it.
I am one of the busiest human beings I know. The moment build season ends, I'm doing other things with my nights. Community colleges will not adjust their semester schedule to accommodate additional weeks of FIRST. The school board will not reschedule meetings. The bee club will still meet the second Monday of every month; the officers the first.
Reducing FIRST to "only" 3-4 days a week, but extending the number of weeks, will create MORE conflicts which will cause MORE exhaustion and MORE burnout, not less. It will render us unable to put in the concentrated time necessary to do the other things we want to do well.
...And that's not even considering the "keeping up with the Joneses" work ethic that many of us middle-tier FIRST teams have--we want to become elite teams, and as I said before, I have a very hard time betting against the work ethic of the likes of Wildstang, Simbotics, Miss Daisy, and other such top-tier teams. I assume that most of them will not moderate their work schedule, but will instead squeeze every minute out that they can--and those that don't will probably stop being top-tier teams in a matter of years.
Burnout became a problem when FIRST added the withholding allowance. "To address problem A, we added X. It caused problem B. So let's not remove X and figure out better ways to address A, let's tinker with Z instead." Um, what?