The blog post makes no mention of whether the team responsible was in any way notified of what took place. I hope that this isn’t the first they’re learning of this.
I am uneasy with judges making decisions without first learning more about the context of the interaction. I hope they spoke to all involved before eliminating the team from consideration.
On the whole, this seems like a passive aggressive way of making a point.
Note: The following post contains many maybes and things to consider. I do not try to assert any facts.
Has anyone even considered the context of the conversation?
I expect the FTA knew plenty about the field system, but how much do they know about play a game of pokemon? How much do they know about how to build a car engine? Maybe the student, albeit rude*, was correct.
Has anyone considered the tone of the students voice? Although it seems implied, it is not spelled out. This thread seems to have two different opinions on how abrasive language can reflect on a person. Maybe it was a conversation between two friends, one who happens to represent FIRST.
Another thing to consider is we are hearing this story 3rd or 4th hand. Could a small detail have been assumed? Could someone have exaggerated something to a point? Is this story being told as the eye-witness or one of the participants recall it?
Again, I am not saying any of this did happen. I am just suggesting that we are taking one side of a story and there might be some details we have overlooked.
*The language can be open to interpretation.
I don’t need to expend much more thinking on the message other than a team that was being considered for a prestigious award was taken out of the running because of a team member’s conduct.
Whether I agree, personally, with how the message was conveyed in Bill’s Blog or not, isn’t important - and that is what I would tell the team when we talk about the impact (positive or negative) of conduct as individuals representing the team and, as a team as a whole.
That’s the bottom line.
Jane
That’s definitely correct.
One thing I think about when I’m out and about is the shirt I wear. Whenever I put on a shirt, chances are that it has a logo on it. That logo represents something–a team, a camp, a company, a college, some group that I have had some association with. If I don’t act in a way that brings respect to that group, or at the very least leaves a neutral impression, I detract from the group’s reputation. I don’t want to detract from that reputation. I can be identified as a member of that group–even by someone who just knows the logo–and what I do affects their reputation.
That’s why I always try to act professionally–or not wear something identifying any groups I’m with when I have fun on the slightly crazy side.
At a regional, anything you say reflects on the team whose shirt you’re wearing–competing team or team of volunteers. When one team makes a bad impression on another team, one or both teams can get a black eye.
My question is, what did the FTA say/do to provoke the comment? You can’t tell me that the person that was doing the yelling was yelling just to yell.
That shouldn’t even be a consideration. No matter how provoked, how angry you are, you ALWAYS act with respect and courtesy. There are ways to get your point across without resorting to swearing. FIRST is real life, not a blog or radio talk show where you can act badly with no consequences. We have not done our job of preparing students for careers if we condone such behavior.
Remember, the field people (with the exception of FIRST employees) are all volunteers. They are volunteering their time and almost always their money to enable YOU to compete. (A few key volunteers sometimes get their expenses paid, but very few.) If volunteers get reactions such as the one being discussed, no matter if it was their fault, they will stop volunteering. It takes a special person to be a FTA - don’t chase them away.
And teams losing awards because of one student’s behavior is unfortunately not rare. It’s an open secret that judges have always asked field personnel if any teams have stood out in their minds, negatively or positively. And not just for incidents on the field either.
And often ask the same question to the volunteers doing queuing, inspections, and staffing pit admin and the safety glass stations.
*There was a team removed from winning a technical award because of some disgraceful behavior reported at the venue that had nothing to do with their amazing robot.
*Edit & Update: The behavior involved the venue and house security having to be called. The judges did investigate. Team reps apologized. Then there was a second incident, similar to the first.
And I’ve heard it also work the other way. Accolades showered on a team by something they quietly did and this reported back to the judging room.
I wonder how often sports teams are penalized for the behavior of fans wearing team jerseys. Probably not often.
When we’re at competition – especially those closest to home – about half of the people walking around the venue in 488 shirts are folks I’ve never seen before.
What do we do? We could deny our supporters the chance to wear our uniform, but that doesn’t really seem to jive with the notion of celebrating what we’re all doing there. We could make them all go sit through some ridiculous “gracious professionalism” lecture, but since these are people I’ve never seen before, I’d rather be happy that they’ve showed up at all.
The short version, I guess, is that I think penalizing an entire group of people for the actions of a small number of people – especially without any notion of the role those people play on the team – is completely ridiculous.
Yes - the message FIRST is sending here is crystal-clear. It looks like they’re telling you that if you have any kids on your team that you can’t trust to not make a dumb comment, ever, then you better kick them off the team and/or not bring them to any events. You know, those types of kids that FIRST probably needs to reach the most - the misguided ones who maybe haven’t always had the best influences in their lives. FIRST apparently doesn’t want any of that type of riff-raff at their events. :rolleyes:
Oh, and you probably better not invite any parents or other adults either. You never know what some unmonitored adult could say that might be tied back to your team. Best just to not have them there, right?
Good grief.
Group punishment is ridiculous under most circumstances, but I think that that’s not the root of the problem.
In a sports context, there’s usually a separation between the fans (even those wearing jerseys) and the players. If a fan ran onto the field wearing team colours, there wouldn’t usually be any question about who was responsible.
In a FIRST context, teams often just mass-produce a shirt and hand it out to anyone with a pulse and a tenuous connection to the team. Since a FIRST team member could be anybody, it’s hard for a judge to guess who’s just a related spectator, and who’s actually on the team (and partially responsible for the team’s conduct).
One solution might be to print two sets of shirts—one for the team, and one for the team’s supporters (labelled as such). Of course, the judges would still have to know how to make the distinction, and it’s not so easy to raise that point with the judges (to make sure they know what to look for) without throwing up red flags.
Either way, the team needs to be cautious about how they’re being perceived.
I understand what the poster is saying here. To use the spilled cup of coffee as an example: You’re in an interview with someone. The interviewer has various papers on his desk, as well as a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He goes to reach for something and accidentally knocks the cup, which spills on the paper. First thing out of his mouth is a muttered “Sh**!” Turns out the coffee just ruined some important document. (Or consider the same situation for someone giving a presentation.)
Now, I don’t think many of us would begrudge the interviewer for that. Personally, curse words have their place. Used right, they can convey a large amount of emotion and/or feeling. Much more than “Darn/Drat/Shucks/Uh-oh”.
Now, I’m not saying that it’s right to direct them towards anyone. However, the tone of most people’s comments are coming across as being rather condescending. I’m just trying to point out that there are situations where a curse word could be considered appropriate.
This may be showing both age and cultural differences between those posting in this thread.
As an illustration - at about midnight with a group in St. Louis at the CMP, I had someone say to me “You are the s**t.”
My face must have looked as shocked as I felt. I was really tired so at first I thought I heard her wrong. This is someone I like, and I thought liked me. However, she is half my age.
I said “What???!”
And she and two others piped in “No, that is good. We all like you.”
I dunno. Sometimes it feels hard to keep up. 
I swear I like you too 
, but being your age I also wouldn’t use those words in polite company.
Shouldn’t judged awards be basded on direct evidence rather than hearsay?
I doubt that feedback from field personnel would be the only input used to base an award on, its just one bit of the data used.
So you are saying that a team whose members scream swears at the FTAs are Gracious and professional (the criterion for a GP award)?
As you said … Good grief.
The team as a whole may be very gracious and professional. What if the person in question was not even a member of aforementioned team? I know lots of people not on our team have Cheesy Poof shirts either through shirt trading, launching them out of the t-shirt cannon or other means. Do we need to require a class on gracious professionalism before someone is allowed to own our shirt?
Furthermore, did the judge go up and talk to the student after it was witnessed? What if the person had Tourette syndrome and was exhibiting coprolalia or something similar? FIRST needs to be careful about using potentially out of context incidents like this as the basis for judged awards (and if they choose to publish them like this, they should release more context)…
I said no such thing, thanks.
FIRST is stating plainly that a team was discarded from awards consideration due to the actions of 1 single person (which is quite a bit different from “a team whose members” which implies many/most of the team). I’d venture a guess that the poorly-behaved student in question was identified as a “team member” based only on the shirt they were wearing too.
My contention is that calling this event out will have the wrong impact: it’s not possible to police all of a teams’ members 100% of the time. Even with extensive “GP training”, some kids won’t believe in it and/or simply won’t get it. So, knowing that, the only way as a team leader that I could avoid being called out in a Bill’s Blog post would be to expunge all the “loose cannon” students and adults from my team. To me, it’s a logical conclusion. However, as I said in my earlier post, the types of kids who are more likely to say something inappropriate from time to time are the same kids who could probably benefit most from FIRST. So, if you make a big stink of “we’re watching you” on a blog and tell a story about how 1 student ruined a team’s chance at an award, maybe you’re inadvertently taking away the opportunity of a program like FIRST from the kids who need it most. I also contend that there’s plenty of students who would never, ever utter the words “you don’t ****ing know what you’re doing” to an adult under any circumstances, but for the most part these are the types of kids that already “get it” and are probably less in need of FIRST showing them the way.
Of course such behavior out of any person, student or adult, should not be condoned. I guess I just hope that the evaluation in Seattle wasn’t as black-and-white as Bill presented it. If a team spends a whole regional helping out every other team there, and a bunch of rookies play on the field who otherwise would have had a pit area full of parts but no robot, and 1 student is caught saying something dumb, should that team be eliminated from consideration for all awards? I sure hope not. I also sincerely hope that the team in question in Seattle was notified of this at the event, because there’s nothing worse than a problem you can’t solve because you don’t even know about it.
Something else for thought: I’m sure there are kids in FIRST who are competitive and don’t mind crossing the line from time to time. An unscrupulous student might look at Bill’s Blog and figure out he has a sure-fire way to help his team out at his next event. His team is up for consideration for the Chairman’s Award and he really, really wants to win, but there’s another team in the running that is strong. Luckily he traded shirts with that team last year, now all he has to do is put on that shirt and go swear at a judge a little, and boom - competition eliminated. Think that’s impossible? I’ll bet there’s some who would have thought no student would say “you don’t ****ing know what you’re doing” to an FTA too.
First off, answering a question with a question isn’t an answer .
Teams are based on all sorts of criterion, and observing them during stressful times is most likely one of those critera.
You might want to consider giving out shirts that are not the ‘team’ shirt, so as to avoid this issue.
If you give out stuff that identifies that person as part of your team (whether they are or not) then any actions they do WILL reflect back on your team, for better or worse.
FTAs are typically a very reliable source of information. If judges had to ‘follow up’ on all ‘ungracious or unprofessional’ outbursts before casting their vote … well, we’d never see a GP award.
As I’ve stated in other places, teams need to understand their members and not put them in a position they cannot handle. In your above example, companies/buisinesses would be careful not to put that person in a position where they would/could cause the company embarrassment (such as spokeman). FIRST teams should do the same.
In the end you should consider this a real world experiance. When you are wearing a team shirt (even if it’s not yours), you represent that team and everything you do reflects back on that team.
Sorry for the double post. We cross posted
Sorry, I didn’t mean to put in a plural. :rolleyes:
And I would not venture any guess as to how they knew what team they were on as we have no information/proof. You, Of course, have already stated otherwise.
Or … you could accept that you will not win the GP award and work to inspire those that need it most.
Also, they were ‘eliminated’ from only the GP award (reread bills blog), not all awards.
Again, we have no data to go on, so I won’t comment on anything else the team ‘may’ have done or not done.
Unfortunately, here, you are correct. As in my last post, teams need to guard their image. Giving out team shirts invites this, hence my suggestion that the shirts teams give out not be the ‘team uniform’.
JM(NS)HO
If this scenario occurs then the team is failing the student. The expectations regarding team behavior (students, parents, and mentors) should be instilled in the team way before a team member has an opportunity to get frustrated with an FTA. Way way before.
Do people get frustrated, mad, impatient, angry? Yes, they do. It’s how they handle those strong emotions that defines their leadership on a field of competition.
Jane