[MR] RE: A&S Competitions

[kniemann at attbi.com]

Hello,

Another two cents to the jar:

When entering an A&S competition  - what is the motivation for doing it? What
are you expecting to get from the experience? Is it that you want to be told
that your item is better than all the others and that you have won? Probably.
We all want to do good work, make nice things and be told that and recognized
for it. Do you just want positive strokes for the things you do well or do you
want critical feedback on what parts are good and what areas could use
improvement? It is difficult for most people to get critical feedback on
something into which they have put lots of time, energy, sweat, passion and
soul. Even when we want to learn we all like to think that we know what we are
talking about. We all like to be "right" or be told that we are headed in the
right direction.

When judging - it is very difficult to give a full review and critique of an
item and have the person reading the comments take them in the same tone in
which they were written, especially if there isn't much time/space for
comments/feedback. (e-mail conversations come to mind here) It is also
very difficult to express to the judges in short bits of documentation or just
a bibliographic listing, what you do and don't know and what you did and didn't
consider when making this item. (I won't go into doing the documentation first
and then doing the project versus trying to find documentation to support the
item made.) Really long detailed documentation is too tedious and time
consuming for a volunteer judge to thoroughly read if they have 5-20+ other
items to review and score as well, and if they want to see or participate in
any other activities at an event.

My personal preference is for personal feed back, one-on-one discussions. It is
much easier to find out what a person does and doesn't know and whether they
want and can handle useful critical feedback versus just wanting positive
strokes and telling them what they did right.

Also, main rule when reading something and in dealing with people you don't
know very very well - "Don't attribute to malice that which you can attribute
to stupidity." Consider that the comments you are reading and that you find
upsetting are just one of the things the judge was thinking about the piece.
Since you don't know what the person was thinking and only have what they've
written to go on - there is a chance that they chose the wrong thought to put
down or the wrong words with which to express it. Judges do get tired of
judging and get tired of having to summarize their feelings about a piece of
work into a few sentences. It's difficlut to volunteer for a job where people
are going to be critical of what and how you write when they have asked you to
leave comments. Find the judge who wrote the comments and ask for
clarification - in virtually all cases they are not mean and nasty but very
approachable and willing to discuss what they've written. Also, search your
soul and your documentation to see if there is any truth to what they wrote -
what did they mean or what facts do you know that they might have confused or
been unawre of. Add this to future documentation so the confusion doesn't
happen again.

It takes much more energy to be mean than to be nice and most people really
have better things to do with their time and energy than to be mean to you.
Unfortunately, thoughtless takes less energy so that is usually what has
happened.

Here ends my hopefuly not thoughtless and certainly not brief thoughts.

Regards,
Thjora

Thjora Arnkitelsdottir, OL
who always avoided entering A&S competitions and who has stopped volunteering
to judge them but will gladly discuss any A&S projects one-on-one.




--
Kirsten Niemann
kniemann at attbi.com