I think First is an amazing organization overall, but it’s frustrating that they don’t understand the corrosive force their attempts to “help“ protected classes actually cause. My daughter is the only girl on her team and thanks to all their efforts to "promote diversity" it puts a ton of pressure on her and her team as they have to keep pushing her forward to show their "commitment to gender equity." She has to keep hunting the school to pressure more girls to join the team so they'll be eligible for advancement. Which is creepy and makes them less likely to join ("Hello fellow kids. You have just the kind of genitals our robotics team requires!"). They even made her team captain as a sophomore, so now she has the burden of a leadership position over a bunch of boys that are older and more experienced than her. She & they all know why she got the captain position and they know they can't say anything about it. If the people at First spent 10 seconds thinking about how all this focus on diversity tokenizes the people they claim they want help they would realize they're not helping anybody.
Yes I agree that FIRST is a great organization...but like with many great ideas, it may have gone off the rails a bit. Does your daughter's team require a certain number of girls to even be considered to advance to other rounds? I haven't heard of those requirements for FLL challenge level... yet...
They don’t explicitly say it’s required. But at a recent FIRST event there were about 8 awards given to teams for various reasons. 5 of the 8 awards were for girls only (one being for the team with the most girls on it). Having those awards gives you points that help the team qualify for the state tournament.
I should mention this is for (FIRST Robotics Competition) FRC.
such a shame right? B/c don't a lot of kids get scholarships via FIRST, and if certain teams get more awards - wouldn't that be an unfair advantage for scholarship opportunities?
I just remember one of the college-aged volunteers at a scrimmage last season - she could check off 2, maybe 3 boxes of the "marginalized" category and she said she was able to receive a lot of different scholarships for college because of her participation in FIRST.
As a Gen Z girl... That sounds AWFUL. Awards should be given based on merit, not... girls. If a man is much more qualified or skilled at something than I am, then he deserves to get the recognition.
So far engineering is one field where all this "woke" hullabaloo hasn't seeped in. Sure, you see the occasional pronouns in an e-mail signature (strangely, it's always the pronouns you'd expect given the person's name/avatar). Mostly we just sit around and talk about exciting stuff like the statement of work or whether or not we meet the requirements. When we're not doing that, we're designing, coding, and analyzing. Unfortunately for these FLL kids, they're not getting a glimpse of what actual engineering looks like. Sounds like an attempt to excite kids to pursue STEM is going to turn them off through a system of unfair competition.
Hopefully, the kids that are naturally inclined to pursue and excel at STEM, will continue onward. But the kids that aren't great at it, but think they're great at it b/c of twisted FLL standards, they may get a hard wake-up call in college.
I would argue that those kids won't make it to college, at least not in an engineering program. But unfortunately colleges and universities were the first to fall to victim to "wokeism" so they're not going to be the gatekeepers they should be. Although the "wokeism" doesn't seem as prevalent in engineering schools as elsewhere. I'm afraid their hard wake-up call will come when their design error ends in death and destruction. The explanation, "We had the most diverse engineering team ever." will not be satisfactory to the people who lose loved ones. And that WILL be the inevitable outcome of "wokifying" STEM.
This is exactly why I dislike the idea of accommodations. Deadlines and standards aren’t arbitrary. They prepare you for a real world where a rushed, incomplete product can’t be excused by an, “oh, but I was feeling stressed that day, and they didn’t give me extra time!”
Chaparral fires have been occurring for millions of years. The severity of the California fires might be tangentially related to DEI in the sense that their fire and land management policies are born of the same socialist agenda as DEI. Socialism destroys; that's not new, we have plenty of real-world evidence. But, it proves my point that platitudes don't soothe those who've lost everything.
America's public health apparatus clearly failed to manage the COVID pandemic. Again, maybe tangentially related to DEI because they decided to throw out the actual playbook and follow communist China's approach (i.e., the socialist approach). I mean the Great Barrington Declaration was simply a group of eminent scientists advocating for a return to the playbook since it was clear the China approach was an utter failure. But the public health apparatus' failure was largely the result of hubris. Hubris which bred incompetence.
We've seen a few reports of aviation accidents recently and it seems they're happening all the time now. But, like "mass shootings", the sensational accidents occur so infrequently that you can't find a statistically significant difference year over year. Follow this https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/AviationQueryv2.aspx, don't add any search terms, and press the Search button at the bottom of the page. You might be surprised by how many low-level accidents occur around the world every year. Most of these occur due to human error and I suspect we'll find this recent spat is largely the result of human error too. Even the most well trained, experience air crew can make catastrophic mistakes.
We're still required to demonstrate that catastrophic failures (those that result in the loss of the aircraft) have a probability of 1 in a billion (0.000000001). That's less that the probability you'll be dealt a royal flush in five card poker (0.00000154). Currently we use what DEI advocates might call "racist" math (and rational people would call real math) to demonstrate a design is compliant. The concern with DEI creeping into engineering is that the math becomes "wokified" such that, when done correctly, will lead to the wrong answer. Or that the engineering team is focused on irrelevant criteria like the sexual, racial, etc. makeup of the team.
The kids are accepted into engineering programs and then the PARENTS freak out when their (adult) child fails freshman math classes…. We are not helping the students and setting them up for an expensive wake up call.
And they're failing their freshman math classes because:
a). High schools are following the "woke" agenda of lowering standards because some people's feelings were hurt when they couldn't meet the previous (not very) high standards.
b). Colleges and universities are lower the standards for admission. Although it's heartening to see most returning to the ACT and SAT.
Parents, like everyone else, are starting to wake up to their misplaced trust in institutions. Of course, there was a time that trust wasn't misplaced and we, as a society, took our eye off the ball and allowed them to degenerate into what they've become today. I've said it before somewhere and I'll say it again here, DEI will die or triumph in the home.
All I’ll say is the people trying to infiltrate my son’s life don’t care if they destroy him. We have abandoned boys to deep sexual trauma at the worst possible moment in their lives for 20 years. That’s all I’m gonna say. wHaTs WrOnG wItH bOyS ? I’m furious with the silent “experts”. I’d vote for pol pot if he’d age-gate internet porno. And apologize for ignoring csa for 20 years.
I think this post does a great job of articulating why some of us get scared about seemingly small things like pronoun boxes. I've never minded them, it helps knowing how to refer to people should someone want to use special pronouns (and I sometimes use them in my own event forms, if only to at least say, "Hey, I might not share your exact opinions, but I promise that doesn't mean I'm going to kill you.").
But others I know, and sometimes myself, see the little signs as indicative of a deeper cultural issue within the organization which it seems like they were a red flag for here. Like all of that "girls in STEM" stuff... Ugh! Did I mention I was once told be someone to join a girls' coding camp, like that would stop me from being bad at programming? Sometimes, I don't want to be the "FEMALE" whatever, I just want to try learning the craft.
The reluctance to acknowledge it's a competition and the weird scoring system would drive me insane if I were involved in this. I regularly call my own creative work "trash" (perhaps too much, my friends get worried, haha!) as a refreshing alternative to the kind of coddling I usually face in creative spaces. We're so scared of making kids feel uneasy or less than nowadays... No, failure and criticism are not going to traumatize children!
I think First is an amazing organization overall, but it’s frustrating that they don’t understand the corrosive force their attempts to “help“ protected classes actually cause. My daughter is the only girl on her team and thanks to all their efforts to "promote diversity" it puts a ton of pressure on her and her team as they have to keep pushing her forward to show their "commitment to gender equity." She has to keep hunting the school to pressure more girls to join the team so they'll be eligible for advancement. Which is creepy and makes them less likely to join ("Hello fellow kids. You have just the kind of genitals our robotics team requires!"). They even made her team captain as a sophomore, so now she has the burden of a leadership position over a bunch of boys that are older and more experienced than her. She & they all know why she got the captain position and they know they can't say anything about it. If the people at First spent 10 seconds thinking about how all this focus on diversity tokenizes the people they claim they want help they would realize they're not helping anybody.
Yes I agree that FIRST is a great organization...but like with many great ideas, it may have gone off the rails a bit. Does your daughter's team require a certain number of girls to even be considered to advance to other rounds? I haven't heard of those requirements for FLL challenge level... yet...
They don’t explicitly say it’s required. But at a recent FIRST event there were about 8 awards given to teams for various reasons. 5 of the 8 awards were for girls only (one being for the team with the most girls on it). Having those awards gives you points that help the team qualify for the state tournament.
I should mention this is for (FIRST Robotics Competition) FRC.
such a shame right? B/c don't a lot of kids get scholarships via FIRST, and if certain teams get more awards - wouldn't that be an unfair advantage for scholarship opportunities?
I just remember one of the college-aged volunteers at a scrimmage last season - she could check off 2, maybe 3 boxes of the "marginalized" category and she said she was able to receive a lot of different scholarships for college because of her participation in FIRST.
As a Gen Z girl... That sounds AWFUL. Awards should be given based on merit, not... girls. If a man is much more qualified or skilled at something than I am, then he deserves to get the recognition.
wow, really interesting, Kyle
So far engineering is one field where all this "woke" hullabaloo hasn't seeped in. Sure, you see the occasional pronouns in an e-mail signature (strangely, it's always the pronouns you'd expect given the person's name/avatar). Mostly we just sit around and talk about exciting stuff like the statement of work or whether or not we meet the requirements. When we're not doing that, we're designing, coding, and analyzing. Unfortunately for these FLL kids, they're not getting a glimpse of what actual engineering looks like. Sounds like an attempt to excite kids to pursue STEM is going to turn them off through a system of unfair competition.
Hopefully, the kids that are naturally inclined to pursue and excel at STEM, will continue onward. But the kids that aren't great at it, but think they're great at it b/c of twisted FLL standards, they may get a hard wake-up call in college.
I would argue that those kids won't make it to college, at least not in an engineering program. But unfortunately colleges and universities were the first to fall to victim to "wokeism" so they're not going to be the gatekeepers they should be. Although the "wokeism" doesn't seem as prevalent in engineering schools as elsewhere. I'm afraid their hard wake-up call will come when their design error ends in death and destruction. The explanation, "We had the most diverse engineering team ever." will not be satisfactory to the people who lose loved ones. And that WILL be the inevitable outcome of "wokifying" STEM.
This is exactly why I dislike the idea of accommodations. Deadlines and standards aren’t arbitrary. They prepare you for a real world where a rushed, incomplete product can’t be excused by an, “oh, but I was feeling stressed that day, and they didn’t give me extra time!”
I hope you are right. But isn't death and destruction already occurring.... California fires, military, public health departments, aviation, etc...
Chaparral fires have been occurring for millions of years. The severity of the California fires might be tangentially related to DEI in the sense that their fire and land management policies are born of the same socialist agenda as DEI. Socialism destroys; that's not new, we have plenty of real-world evidence. But, it proves my point that platitudes don't soothe those who've lost everything.
America's public health apparatus clearly failed to manage the COVID pandemic. Again, maybe tangentially related to DEI because they decided to throw out the actual playbook and follow communist China's approach (i.e., the socialist approach). I mean the Great Barrington Declaration was simply a group of eminent scientists advocating for a return to the playbook since it was clear the China approach was an utter failure. But the public health apparatus' failure was largely the result of hubris. Hubris which bred incompetence.
We've seen a few reports of aviation accidents recently and it seems they're happening all the time now. But, like "mass shootings", the sensational accidents occur so infrequently that you can't find a statistically significant difference year over year. Follow this https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/AviationQueryv2.aspx, don't add any search terms, and press the Search button at the bottom of the page. You might be surprised by how many low-level accidents occur around the world every year. Most of these occur due to human error and I suspect we'll find this recent spat is largely the result of human error too. Even the most well trained, experience air crew can make catastrophic mistakes.
We're still required to demonstrate that catastrophic failures (those that result in the loss of the aircraft) have a probability of 1 in a billion (0.000000001). That's less that the probability you'll be dealt a royal flush in five card poker (0.00000154). Currently we use what DEI advocates might call "racist" math (and rational people would call real math) to demonstrate a design is compliant. The concern with DEI creeping into engineering is that the math becomes "wokified" such that, when done correctly, will lead to the wrong answer. Or that the engineering team is focused on irrelevant criteria like the sexual, racial, etc. makeup of the team.
The kids are accepted into engineering programs and then the PARENTS freak out when their (adult) child fails freshman math classes…. We are not helping the students and setting them up for an expensive wake up call.
And they're failing their freshman math classes because:
a). High schools are following the "woke" agenda of lowering standards because some people's feelings were hurt when they couldn't meet the previous (not very) high standards.
b). Colleges and universities are lower the standards for admission. Although it's heartening to see most returning to the ACT and SAT.
Parents, like everyone else, are starting to wake up to their misplaced trust in institutions. Of course, there was a time that trust wasn't misplaced and we, as a society, took our eye off the ball and allowed them to degenerate into what they've become today. I've said it before somewhere and I'll say it again here, DEI will die or triumph in the home.
All I’ll say is the people trying to infiltrate my son’s life don’t care if they destroy him. We have abandoned boys to deep sexual trauma at the worst possible moment in their lives for 20 years. That’s all I’m gonna say. wHaTs WrOnG wItH bOyS ? I’m furious with the silent “experts”. I’d vote for pol pot if he’d age-gate internet porno. And apologize for ignoring csa for 20 years.
Thanks for sharing this essay!
I think this post does a great job of articulating why some of us get scared about seemingly small things like pronoun boxes. I've never minded them, it helps knowing how to refer to people should someone want to use special pronouns (and I sometimes use them in my own event forms, if only to at least say, "Hey, I might not share your exact opinions, but I promise that doesn't mean I'm going to kill you.").
But others I know, and sometimes myself, see the little signs as indicative of a deeper cultural issue within the organization which it seems like they were a red flag for here. Like all of that "girls in STEM" stuff... Ugh! Did I mention I was once told be someone to join a girls' coding camp, like that would stop me from being bad at programming? Sometimes, I don't want to be the "FEMALE" whatever, I just want to try learning the craft.
The reluctance to acknowledge it's a competition and the weird scoring system would drive me insane if I were involved in this. I regularly call my own creative work "trash" (perhaps too much, my friends get worried, haha!) as a refreshing alternative to the kind of coddling I usually face in creative spaces. We're so scared of making kids feel uneasy or less than nowadays... No, failure and criticism are not going to traumatize children!