Quote:
Originally Posted by PayneTrain
I have difficulty understanding this point of view. Do you not understand that
A) teams are already meeting after stop build day at a volume similar to build season
B) teams are not obligated to meet at the same volume after build season as they were before build season, and they would be under no other obligation to do that if bag day is eliminated
Or is there another breakdown somewhere?
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I'm going to apologize immediately because this turned into something sort of all over the place, but still mostly related to this discussion.
Teams and the people involved with them are (with a few exceptions) not obligated to do much anything at all. For the most part this entire endeavor or building robots and competing with them, of mentoring and educating students, is completely voluntary. FIRST doesn't tell us we need to meet every day of the week any more than they tell us how many wheels we can have on our robot. We choose to do it, for all sorts of reasons.
There's been much made of the difference between "average" teams and successful teams, but a good deal of it boils down to time, culture, and by extension, community. Success isn't just about wanting to succeed as a team-- I'd argue that nobody wants to fail, it's feeling the burning desire, the passion that drives you to spend more time than someone else might consider possible doing something you love. I know when I was in high school, what got me out of bed from January to April wasn't the 8 hours of formal schooling I had ahead of me, but the hours I know I would be spending from 3 to 9 on robotics, whether we were meeting or not. Now, I've tempered a little in college, but now I bus an hour and a half each way to help three FTC teams and an FRC team twice a week outside of build season and probably way too much during build season, while still balancing all the normal demands of getting a degree and having a personal life. I know I'm not alone in loving this program, and I would gladly spend more time working with my students if it were physically possible, but rationally, I know that if I had a longer build season with my students, it's very unlikely it would be a positive thing for me.
I should also probably say how stop build actually affects me and my team: it cuts our number of shop hours (especially on Saturdays) down to about 3/4 to 1/2 of what it is during build season. It reduces the days I bus down from 4-5 to 2. The people in the shop are almost exclusively people who actually have work to do, or who are highly passionate about what's going on. They'd be in the shop whether there was a stop build day or not. This is also pretty much how it was on my high school team, and I'd imagine it's something like what FIRST expects the effect to be.
In our society there are a number of laws to help save people from themselves, and in FRC that's how I view the stop build day. On one level, I hate it, and wish it would go away forever so I can divert the resources we've been using to work around those limits to more valuable things, but on the other hand, I love it because it means I can start ramping down my robotics induced insanity and take a step back to reevaluate where I'm at in all the other (equally important, but more often ignored) aspects of my life.
So yes, FIRST doesn't tell me I need to add on a 40 hour work week with my team, but I do it anyways because I love it, during build season. But on a less visceral level, I can sometimes appreciate "the man" coming in and telling me it's time to dial it back for a little bit. And while at the time I fight it, at the same time I know it's probably what's best for me and a number of other people.
A small note on the difference between FTC/VEX and FRC-- and don't get me wrong, I love FTC, and though I'm only now participating in VEX U, I'm sure I would have loved being a part of a VEX team in grade school too-- they are, without a doubt, less intense programs on average. Yes, there are teams that are more intense than the average FRC team, but FRC, especially at the middle to high level, is, well, the hardest fun you'll ever have. There's so much more pressure to succeed and do well at competition, both internally and externally. It's that sporting atmosphere, the drive for victory, that, like in "real" sports, fires people up. FTC has some of that, but the events are smaller, the teams are smaller, and the stakes are smaller, and so the fire is less intense. In FRC, even lower resource, smaller teams have people who are intensely interested in the competition as a whole. I'm not sure the same can be said in FTC.
tl;dr: I hate stop build because it's an obstacle when working with my team, but I love it because it saves me from myself