My Kid’s team got the Judges Award! The reason given had something to do with the 2nd and 3rd graders who proved that they belonged there in that competition.
Last year a second group of competitive “Lego Boys” graduated leaving my daughter as the most veteran member of the team. It was intimidating. The competition is for students through 8th grade. Some of our smallest team members calmly controlled their robots next to middle-school competitors with facial hair! Our kids held it together with poise and enthusiasm. It was a joy to behold. No wonder the judges gave this team an award. Our teachers who sponsor the after school program were so proud, deservedly so.
An award for research went to the team from the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, which made my daughter’s eyes light up. She wants to go to that middle school, only a block away from the NYU-Poly campus where the Brooklyn FLL Robotics Tournament was held.
Most my daughter’s friends want to go to schools that focus on the performing arts or maybe writing and drawing. They and are not interested in going to an all girl math and science school even if it does have dance and art and three foreign languages. I didn’t see many familiar faces from her Brooklyn Heights elementary school at the open house last fall. Ideally that is because it’s a school intended for a very specific demographic to which my child happens to belong. But, I’m afraid it is also because this school is not one of the schools that is on the radar of the uber-involved public school parents of Brownstone Brooklyn.
I suspect that parents of the Brooklyn Heights/Park Slope demographic are put off by the dearth of pale faces represented in the student body.
I came to the realization, during the course of this FLL Robotics Tournament, our fourth, that the Robotics Team is the only extracurricular activity at my daughter’s elementary school which includes borough-wide competition. We we are exposed through FLL to large numbers of tech savvy children of color being videotaped and photographed with their robots by large numbers of involved parents of color who are spending all day Saturday whiling away the long tournament hours checking their blackberries and smart phones and working on their laptops while waiting for the next round of standing-up-to-cheer-for-kids-robots-and-schools.
When a family’s elementary school experience includes events like the annual Brooklyn Borough-wide First Lego League Tournament, they are less prone to dismiss a school at first glance because they don’t see their pink child reflected in the brown faces of the students attending that school, because they do see her there.