[Eric Bareiss]

Something I have been noticing a lot of lately is students getting on here and proclaiming that they run their own teams and they do everything and they are awesome and they don’t even need mentors. I have given it some serious thought and I finally decided to post about it.

There are two big issues that I want to address about this subject.

For all of the students who believe that you run your own teams: You have no idea what it means to run a team. You can say whatever you want, tell me all of the things you do, all the responsibilities you have, I still don’t believe you. I am talking to you as a former snot nosed kid who thought he knew everything. Until you graduate high school and join a team as an actual “Mentor” you have no place to say you run your team. For every hour you spend screwing pieces of your robot together, 20 hours of important stuff goes on behind your back.

Did you call the travel agency and arrange the travel plans, make sure they got the check, type up the permission slips, make sure everyone turned them in, find the teacher chaperones, order all the parts for the robot, register your team for events, order the t-shirts, get all of the students released from school, arrange transportation to and from the airport? Did you do ALL of those things? Well, someone did.

The bigger issue I have: What would your mentor say if you told them you do all of the work on the team? Do you think it makes your mentors feel respected when you say that? If I heard my kids saying that, I would leave them high and dry. I would take a year off and see how they did without me.

Someone made a simple post about how we should have a competition where the student and mentors roles were reversed and ten students wrote that nothing would change for them if we did that. For those ten people, let me tell you. You obviously have no idea what your mentors do for you!! It wasn’t until after I graduated that I realized what my mentors did for me. Honestly, you get more out of it than they do, I don’t know why they stay. They only do it to watch you grow.

Start respecting your mentors more or they might just leave.