[Disclaimer: This may take awhile to publish since this is actually my first post on Chief Delphi, so there may be better posts/threads about this subject. I wrote this on 4.24.17 at 11 AM!]
This is my 2nd year with FIRST (1st year as mentor-in-training), so I’m still fairly new and energetic about competitions. The 2016 World Championship was definitely one highlight of many of my time with FIRST. I often watch the streams from home, because the competitions are less anxiety-provoking there and watching the live stream for Worlds really helped me really enjoy the competition. People were making good jokes and cheering on the teams. I remember I told them our operator’s name when she was interviewed (or maybe just shown on screen, I don’t remember) and everyone was giving her so much love and encouragement, especially when she seemed a little nervous. That made me so happy to be a part of this community.
- This year’s Houston World Championship was way far from that. I understand and do agree with the criticism FIRST is getting because of it, however, it was incessant and non-constructive on the live stream. (ableism) People were making “jokes” (they weren’t funny and were harmful) that “FTC is FRC’s autistic brother”. I’d like to say that happened only once, but it happened several times, along with other harmful and un-GP “jokes”. It was really upsetting to see and I was not able to enjoy the live stream even close to how much I had enjoyed it last year.
Because the moderators were overworked with this mess, I often called people out in chat, to let them and other people know that this should not be happening, especially in a FIRST chat. I got comments that I “didn’t have a sense of humor” and laughter that I was referencing gracious professionalism, even though it is a good, concise phrase, in my opinion. It was disheartening to see. We should be a community that has fun together! We should be a community that lifts each other up and supports each others growth. We should be a community that doesn’t bring others down for their different experiences. We should all be more understanding.
- This is a community for high school students, and seeing the above poor behavior from fellow mentors makes me upset. We were all in high school at some point. We all know that it had a lot of sucky moments. Why are we adding to that? Why are we pushing such a toxic environment on the next generation of still growing, brilliant thinkers?
It isn’t “babying” to be more understanding. Understanding makes life go much more smoothly. There is always room for improvement and change, and shutting down students who bring up concerns that they’re being hurt will only bring the opposite of improvement. I’ve heard too many concerns from students about the lack of understanding and outright dismissal of their feelings from mentors and coaches and I think we all need to take a hard look at ourselves and our behavior towards these students. We need to actually listen and have discussions with our students about what we can do better because FRC is a community for high school students.
TL;DR: This post is kind of messy, but I think it’s all very important.
- The community environment generally needs to mind gracious professionalism more and needs to be more understanding.
- Mentors and coaches need to be more open and mindful towards the needs of high school students we mentor.
Thanks for reading if you did. I’m definitely open to more discussion about this. Congrats to the Houston World Champions and good luck to St. Louis competitors!