Teachers, assessment and FRC

[dtengineering]

I get what your prof is saying... FIRST and FRC participants, and VEX and VRC participants, and BotBall and BotBall participants, and High School Drag racing participants and Skills Canada participants and all sorts of programs would probably do just fine on standardized pre and post skills inventory tests and sure... it would be interesting to someone, somewhere, to measure that.

But I also get that what your prof is really saying is "We don't have a way to measure passion. We don't have a way to measure inspiration. We can't figure out what the long term impacts are because that will take at least 20 or 30 years and your paper is due Thursday. So let's measure this thing that I think we can measure, regardless of how relevant it is."

And I get that... I really do. I've jumped through the hoops, cited the studies and (amongst some other, more meaningful stuff) earned a couple of education degrees. It's not bad to say we can't measure passion... but we need to be honest about it... and not try and pass off some standardized test as an acceptable proxy.

I think most FRC coaches, mentors, volunteers and sponsors will agree with me when I say that we don't give up our evenings, weekends and (in many cases) a large part of our weekdays so that our students will score three percent higher on their next physics test. Yeah, it's great if they do, but taking away their TV and cramming facts into their head from a textbook will do that just fine, too.

We do it because we see that girl on the build team discover that she's not the only girl who likes to build things. That she's actually pretty normal to want to learn to weld. We do it to see the kid who's maybe not great academically, but awesome mechanically, discover that his talents require just as much smarts as those kids who cruise through math class without even trying. We do it to see that quiet grade 8 kid grow up to be the team captain four years later. We do it to share our passion.

And the only thing that can really measure that is when you look a kid in the eye, say "We've got a problem..." and you see them smiling, "Bring it on."

Good luck with the research... don't let the bastards grind you down!

Jason