Quote:
Originally posted by Keiko173
discrimination is a very hard thing to deal with and is sometimes and unspoken problem on my team
One of our team mentors thinks that the drive team should be an equal representation of the team rather than the people best qualified for the job. Because our team goes from urban to suburban to rural towns, there is a great mix of culture, so therefore making an equal representation is hard. What this mentor has often done is chosen the drive team without consulting the team members at all [which had been done in the past]
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Wow ... you just described exactly what happened on our team this year. We have people from the governer's school (a magnet school for gifted kids), the Vocation Technical school (for kids in classes like welding, autobody, etc), and Point Options (a "last chance" type school for would-be drop outs). Our team leader felt it would only be fair if we had each one of the "factions" represented on the drive team. This caused a LARGE rift during the build season (oh yeah ... we decided the drive team at the last minute). I do feel this has been debated and talked about suffuiciently on our team, such that another debacle will not happen next year.
Speaking about factions, last year our teachers accused the people on our team of discriminating against the different schools, and being exclusionary. Part of it is natural ... I am a programmer, so I am around programmers/eletrical people all year, so I tend to hang out with those kids, just because I know them better. It's not that I have anything against another student just because he goes to a VoTech school, it's just that by circumstance, I'm not around him a lot. I do act friendly at competitions and such (well ... I am a shy person, so this is a relative term I suppose), but my teacher complained that afterwards, when us kids would go out to have fun, we would form groups ("factions"), and exclude other groups, completely based on which school a student goes to. Now, I know this sounds a lot like typical high school elitism, forming cliques of friends and assuming a role of social dominance, but our mentor's accusations were really unfounded. Any result was not due to active discrimination on our part, but by circumstance. This year, for instance, a few of the VoTech kids went to a lot of our parties and such (the kids on our team like to throw robotics parties, where we invite everyone on our team to just have fun). We became friends, and the issue of school never really came up. Of course, our teacher still accused us of exclusionary practices (*sigh*).
To answer the question ... discrimination can rear its ugly head in many circumstances. In our team we never really noticed it until our teacher attempted to "set things right" by discriminating himself. In our situation at least, the teachers are making a mountain out of a molehill, because I know the kids don't take what school someone goes to into consideration when making friends. In other circumstances, though, I suppose it can be a serious problem, which must be fought and countered if the discriminated person wishes to continue to participate in his team.
Stephen