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Originally Posted by Jack Jones
Amen Brother Martus. I didn't think they could do worse than last year's spare parts rule, which I likened to some kind of religious mindset - I.E. The FIRST Commandments:
Remember the Sabbath by keeping it holy. Six weeks you shall labor and do all your work, but the days until the first event and those between are the Sabbath to the FIRST. On them you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your engineer or engineerette, nor your Bridgeport, nor the teacher within your gates. For six weeks the righteous moved the heavens and the earth. Therefore, the FIRST blessed the Sabbath and made it holy.
Appears that now it's gone all the way to fanaticism?
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You're being facetious, but why not? What is wrong about limiting this madness to six weeks? High school football teams are limited as to what they can do when, i.e., you can lift weights and work out all summer, but you can't have an actual practice until so many days before the season starts. The reason rules like that are in place is so that those coaches who are most willing to take up every minute of their players' lives don't have as much of an advantage over those who are unwilling to.
The concept of a "Sabbath" might be based in religion, but it's not there arbitrarily - people really do need time to rest. You absolutely need time to stop focusing on work, and (literally or figuratively) smell the roses (unless you happen to be a florist, then just figuratively). Extended periods of highly stressful activity (like FIRST) take their toll on our physical, mental, and spiritual health, on our family, on every aspect of our lives. It makes sense that the time period that we do this should not be unduly extended, and that those who would extend it for themselves and for their students should not gain a huge advantage over those would rather take a breath.
We need well-rounded future engineers, and that's what FIRST is promoting with this rule.