Instead of directly participating in this thread, and join in a discussion I see as one of the most important discussions of all time, in both the forum and the FIRST community, I would like to make the following observations.
There are several debates that kept coming back every year: amount of mentor participation, engineer build vs. student build, too many or too little competitiveness, the goal of FIRST, and more recently, collaboration between teams, and sharing design and parts.
These recurring debates had and always will be the instruments in which everyone reevaluate and rediscover the precise meaning of FIRST in their hearts. The meaning of FIRST itself will continue to evolve and diversify as FIRST participants (returning and incoming) move forward in directions they think are most suitable for their team. The program itself will continue to grow and change as the world around and the people within continue to grow and change.
You think you got the right answer? Think again. You think you got the right way to run a FIRST team? Try showing up to a competition and talk to all the teams in the pit area. In my 6 years of participation since 1999, growing from a FIRST student to a FIRST event organizer, to this day I continue to discover new meanings of being a part of FIRST. And to this day, I am still amazed at how different and creative everyone is in their way of life in FIRST.
So, while you debate and argue heatedly all these important issues, bare in mind that the diversity is a strength of this program, not weakness. And most importantly, don’t ever doubt, not even for a second, that the intentions of those you argue with of being in this program is anything less than good. Because I can assure you, everyone in FIRST is in it for the right reason.
Understand that, and you will understand a lot more.
P.S. At the risk of going off topic, I came across a section in a books I am reading that I found somewhat relevant to the passion and arguments in this discussion. How much you will get from it,though, that's entirely up to you.
Quote:
(The stage is set in the 1850’s, when the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854 was just passed and anti-slavery sentiments has grown to a new high. Lincoln was just a traveling circuit lawyer at the time, after serving his only term in Congress.)
Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitable be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all avenues to his head and his heart.”
Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to be the heaviest lance, harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reform could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” This, he concluded, was the only road to victory – to that glorious day “when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.”
|