What Happens To Your Attitude Towards Gracious Professionalism When You Leave FIRST?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by iCurtis

Posting a rant about how Gracious Professionalism will never find its way into "the real world" on a public forum visited by hundreds, if not thousands of high school FIRSTers hardly seems in line with preventing the transfer of any cynicism and pessimism into students.


That said, preventing the transfer of any cynicism and pessimism seems an awful lot like censoring, and no one likes to be censored. Healthy debate is always good, and that seems to be what we have here.

You would prefer I had lied and said that the real world was full of roses and bunnies and rainbows? I could do that but I felt it was more important to let the students know the real world doesn't want GP, it wants profit. GP can't be gently put into the real world. I believe my posts accurately reflects my views of the real world. Additionally it helped spur discussion, without someone taking an opposite side this discussion would quickly have ended.

As a mentor I do try my best, I am only human, we all fail sometimes, my rant was partially fueled by my frustrations at school and work, working in this sort of economy as a CoOp is not a pleasant experience. As such many of us are quite stressed and more and more people are cynical about our futures. I believe it is in our best interests not to hide our views of reality from our students, to do that would be dishonest and against our goals. Only by presenting the cold hard stuff of reality can we be sure our students are adequately informed to choose engineering as a major.