TED SHINTA

Engineering Teacher

“When I first started with the robotics team, it was maybe the third or fourth year and we had a huge conflict on the robotics team where all the seniors left. They were trying to run things, you know, they were bullying honestly and they thought that if they left, the team would be messed up. In other words, they're willing to sabotage the whole project to have their way. But I couldn't allow that to happen, because what was happening were things that as an adult, I can't allow to happen in a club. So basically, they left and the team should have been messed up but it turned out that we came out with a fairly decent robot. Simple, but fairly decent. We made it all the way up to either semifinals or finals that year; we went quite high.

There was a moment where the driver and I – I'm not even on the field. I'm up in the stands thinking and sharing with him – we're talking and I was thinking, ‘yeah, do this,’ and I guess the driver and I were thinking the same thing because he did it. That move won us that match and we advanced to the next round. I think we lost the next match but when he ran over that thing – I really remember that – it was this idea that we had good intentions. It was always our intention to do our best, given what we have, and to try our best not to get all stressed out and be decent people, not to bully and treat people badly. The people that were left on the team – because the people who left were the ones who kind of wanted to do the wrong thing – were willing to pull together and work together. They really got further than the seniors thought they would, [the seniors] really thought they messed us up but it turned out that after they left we had a much happier time. Everybody was happy and we had a harmonious working environment. And then we ended up doing really well.

I felt really good about that. You’d think it'd be something like a baby born or something like that, but I'm not married so there was nothing like that in my life. But that really was one of those things that I just thought, ‘Yeah it's better to be good, you know, better to do the right thing.’ We could have done horribly too, but to be rewarded for being for, for being correct, you know, for not being jerks. And so, and I think a lot of the students that were there that year did learn that so it made me feel good.”