[DavidtheKing]

This is a serious thread, please no jokes or wise cracks.

So I've been with my FIRST team for three years now, and it's been an amazing experience so far. As I've made the progression from a freshman to a junior, I've become more and more involved with team. Last year, our team was able to use our mill and lathe for the first time, and I was among the first people on our team to learn to use these tools and be able to fabricate homemade parts for the robot, which helped tremendously with cost and time. At the end of that season, I began to learn complex CAD and worked on several important projects during this years preseason, such as prototyping a butterfly drivetrain and an instrumented drive system. So far this season, I have been very involved the actual robot design and actually helped to design an entire subsystem on the robot. Unfortunately, most of our seniors are graduating this year which means next season I will literally be the only veteran team member who is experienced in the mechanical department (bring it on). This one of the few things in life so far that I've actually been internally motivated to do (besides video games and few sports lol), and it’s helped me think about my career choices and decide what I want to do in the future. And on the way I've met so many great people who have shared their knowledge and mentored me along the way.

So what does all this have to do with the title?

All this time, I have lacked one key thing: parental support. My parents are immigrant Asians from China, and unfortunately are the hardheaded kind. Through all of my time in robotics, they have called it a waste of time and have gone as far as restricting my meeting times and how long I can stay at some meetings. They also scold me when I spend “too much time” working on the robot. They think that having to stay after school for 6 hours 4 days a week building a robot will ruin my chances of getting into college because it will cause my grades to drop from all A's and one B to all A's and two B's (with four weighted classes). This was actually their reason for being so harsh about robotics last year. My mom has had a better attitude about robotics in the last few months since she learned more about it, but it's not much better. (2 days ago she scolded me for playing video games when I wasn't supposed to because I was designing something in CAD and she thought it was a video game. -__-) If I ask my dad why he makes me skip some of the meetings, he starts talking about how this is a waste of time and because I don’t have any special talents I need to focus on getting a 36 on the ACT and getting all A’s in school.

Now before everyone starts bashing my parents because they hate robotics, you have to understand their viewpoint. In China, the education system is very exam-oriented and score-based, and has been for the last 50 or so years. At the end of high school, every high school student takes an entrance exam called the Gao Kao (高考). This is basically an all or nothing test. If you don’t get into a certain percentile you don’t go to college. Period. And if you don’t go to college, you’re basically doomed to work in a sweatshop or in manual labor making $2 a day for the rest of your life. It is a horrible system. Students from rich families will often secretly bribe teachers to change their scores, and this type of corruption carries over to other institutions, from the government to college to even driving tests to earn a driver’s license (this is probably where the stereotype that Asians are bad drivers comes from). The other students basically devote their lives into turning themselves into test-taking robots in order to pass this rigorous exam. And this is the system that my parents struggled through, with a violent communist revolution happening on top of everything. And this is where that 36 on the ACT and straight A's with nothing else thing comes in. It's how they see education. And you can't really blame them for it.

Unfortunately, my parents have also refused to listen to anything I say or argue to them, and this also kind of extends from a cultural perspective. This is where the real problem lies. I will try to explain to them why robotics takes so much time and why it is worth it. My mom will listen but doesn’t really say anything, and my dad will flat out interrupt me and tell me that I’m not in position to argue. Both of them will then usually launch into a lecture about grades again. My dad also complains sometimes about having to give me rides. I swear, getting something to go into my dad's head is like trying to cut a steel hex shaft with a wood blade. So the final question is, how do I get my dad to listen to me and to appreciate my experience in robotics, and in turn stop imposing these restrictions? One of my team mentors has offered to talk to him for me but my dad has already made it clear that he is not hearing any of it and has said not to give his contact information to anyone on robotics. My mom just kind of goes with what my dad says, which makes it hard for her to hear me out as well. How can I get my parents to stop being such jerks to me about robotics?