On Jul 16, 8:52�pm, "Dee Flint" wrote:

We should all take this story to heart as it's likely we've all had
experiences where people wanted to "clip our wings" to
prevent us from soaring with the eagles.

Here's an example:

My high school was involved in a competition known then as
"Mathletes", where we'd compete against teams from other schools in
solving math problems.

IMHO there was never a more level playing field, because all
competitors got the same problems, the same amount of time and had the
same resources.

In my senior year we had so many students who wanted to compete and
who met the requirements that my school fielded two independent teams,
"A" and "B". This was not unusual; other schools did the same thing.

The overall City championship was determined by the season points
total of a given team - highest scoring team got first place, second
highest got second place, etc. The top two positions were the big ones
to win.

But at the end of the last meet, our A team had the highest season
points score, and the B team had the second highest. Two winning teams
from the same school had never happened before, and the officials were
somewhat unsure of what to do.

So after some deliberation they gave the first place trophy jointly to
the A and B team from my school, and the second place trophy to the
*third* place team. Their reasoning was that they didn't want the rest
of the teams to feel bad - that it somehow wasn't "good" for one
school to walk off with both trophies.

All of us on both the A and B teams learned a lesson that day. I don't
think it was the lesson the officials wanted us to learn, though.

73 de Jim, N2EY