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Can't help myself, since I was today deeply disappointed to find out my son's expensive private school didn't reward him for developing (with my help) an electr

Can't help myself, since I was today deeply disappointed to find out my son's expensive private school didn't reward him for developing (with my help) an electromechanical solution to an ostensibly mechanical STEM contest. A solution that was well within the rules but not thought of by anyone else. What pre-college and high school kids should be taught: 1. School is nothing like the real world. The real world rewards innovation. 2. The conformal tyranny of the mediocre exists only in schools (and, to a degree, in large orgs) and will not impede you in the real world. Ignore it or fight it. 3. There are no grades in the real world, only degrees of success. 4. The only meaningful outside validation is your reward for your hard work. Not just money, as success can be measured otherwise, but reward. 5. There are no rewards for following the rules, being agreeable or staying with the herd. In this sense, school will be more damaging than helpful. School is something you'll have to get through and then undo. 6. The amount of money spent on school or the school's reputation doesn't alleviate these fundamental issues. How the F can you have a STEM contest that doesn't reward the most innovative solution? What kind of lesson is that teaching.

michaelt 7y ago
> How the F can you have a STEM contest that doesn't reward the most innovative solution? It's frustrating - but a competition that truly didn't care about anything except the best solution wouldn't have limited entry to high school kids! When I was in high school, I was the only kid with a home computer (this was some time ago!) and the only kid whose dad had a CNC machine shop at his beck and call. So I won quite a lot of prizes. But even with those resources, I didn't win 100% of the time. Maybe some competitions inferred from my work that I'd had an 'unfair'. Maybe they couldn't tell how much of the work was of my own hand. Maybe they feared becoming a competition for 'best parent' instead of 'best student'. Maybe they were trying to encourage students and judged I didn't need any encouragement, or that their scheme to encourage more students into engineering wouldn't work if the prizes always went to someone with a parent who was an engineer. The good news is, loads of competitions didn't really give a shit about those things, and were happy to give me a prize. You've just got to enter more competitions until you find ones that you win :)

michaelt 7y ago

> How the F can you have a STEM contest that doesn't reward the most innovative solution? It's frustrating - but a competition that truly didn't care about anything except the best solution wouldn't have limited entry to high school kids! When I was in high school, I was the only kid with a home computer (this was some time ago!) and the only kid whose dad had a CNC machine shop at his beck and call. So I won quite a lot of prizes. But even with those resources, I didn't win 100% of the time. Maybe some competitions inferred from my work that I'd had an 'unfair'. Maybe they couldn't tell how much of the work was of my own hand. Maybe they feared becoming a competition for 'best parent' instead of 'best student'. Maybe they were trying to encourage students and judged I didn't need any encouragement, or that their scheme to encourage more students into engineering wouldn't work if the prizes always went to someone with a parent who was an engineer. The good news is, loads of competitions didn't really give a shit about those things, and were happy to give me a prize. You've just got to enter more competitions until you find ones that you win :)