*slowly climbing up on that soap box with creaky knees and a fear of heights*...
Several years ago when I first found out about the Woodie Flowers Award, I went through a series of feelings and thoughts: awe, wonder, surprise, it's about time an organization came up with something like this, quiet humility for those quiet mentors who do so much, joy, and back to awe. I then learned that convincing a team or teams to allow themselves to feel the pride, joy, and celebration of submitting a Woodie Flowers Award entry, is something that can be very difficult to do. For one thing, the mentors can be stubborn as mules. Bull-headed. Too busy to pay attention to that stuff. They can set up a road block and without meaning to, send signals to the students that the WFA is no biggie. Some teams don't even know about it, if the students, mentors, parents don't take the time to read the manual - the whole manual - and nothing but the manual. The WFA submission can fly below the radar and get pushed away because of the time crunch. If teams haven't organized themselves into sub-teams that address the different aspects of the competition, they may falter when it comes to deadlines for the submissions. In the case of the WFA and the Chairman's Award, it is my opinion that even if the deadline is missed, the team should finish them anyway and keep them in a scrapbook for the team the
next year, saying, 'this is what we did this year, now it's your turn. Do it better.' For teams who have submitted and their mentor has won the WFFA or the WFA, don't let that stop you or prevent your team from continuing to submit. There are many many valuable mentors who donate blood, sweat, and tears to your team year after year. These same valuable devoted mentors are often the same ones who are stubborn as mules or bull-headed. That is when it time for the team to become clever and write the submission about them. They are so busy sticking their heads in the drivetrains or staring dazedly at the computer screen that they won't notice that a student or two has teamed up with a parent or another mentor and beautifully crafted an essay that celebrates what this mentor has meant to the team. I'm a very crafty person, if you have any questions about how to do this in a sneaky fashion, I'm your man...I mean woman. Send me a pm. It may be too late to submit an essay for an award this year but it isn't too late to recognize your beloved mentors. And there is always next year. Do it better.
Can someone help me off this soap box, please?
