Problems with overbearing mentors

[Martian86]

Before I say anything further, I'd like to point out that I am very grateful that our team has mentors that are willing to spend so much time with the team. That being said...

This year our team had a serious problem with some of the mentors taking over operations from students, being somewhat condescending/patronizing toward us, and not reading the manual. The mentors in question have been with the team the same amount of time as the senior members of the team, give or take a year or two. We (the students) are capable of most of the design, build, wiring, controls, programming, etc, aspects of the robot; at the very least, we're just as capable as the mentors since many of the parts are specialized for FRC, especially the control system. I'll go over a few of the highlights of the problem for this season.

1. In general, our mentors take it as a personal offense if we do not use their designs, and they push for their own designs on the robot even after we've proven that they either don't work at all or don't work as well as another design.

2. At one point during the build season, I had a thirty minute argument with a mentor over height restrictions. I read the manual and he did not. I showed/read him G22 and G23 several times, as did other members of the team, but it still took half an hour to convince him of what was printed in the manual.

3. At another point, two mentors were arguing over something in the design (specifics aren't important) and leaving students out of the discussion completely. I ended up telling them, in the most respectful way I could, that they needed to explain to the students what they were discussing and then take a break from the robot for a couple of hours. I'll admit this must have been entertaining to watch, a 17 year old girl telling two grown men to go on a time out, but it should not have been necessary.

4. Finally, the last weekend before Stop Build Day: We had mentors speaking to us as if we did not know what we were doing, changing things on the robot without telling us, and insisting that we needed a catching mechanism when senior members of the team had already decided that it would be impractical for our team to try to do everything. We would try to explain why we did things a certain way, how something worked, or what we had already tried (while troubleshooting), and mentors would interrupt and talk over us. I had multiple team members tell me that they were ready to go home early and just let the mentors fix the robot themselves.

Has anyone else ever had similar problems with mentors? Any advice for dealing with this in the future that I can use at competition and/or pass on to next year's captain?

Once again, I really do appreciate all the time and energy the mentors put into the team. I just wish they would direct more of this time and energy toward collaboration instead of domination.