Why I Hate Group Projects

Yes. Sometimes there’s more to life than soundbites. It helps that there are paragraphs and dialog and that it’s well-written and entertaining. I’m not in such a hurry that I can’t stop and read at my leisure.

But Other People, as a group, are morons. What contribution could they make that would improve the presentation?

Unless they were cute. Were Miss Sunshine and Hippie Chick cute? Because that goes a long way toward mitigating their stupidity, and I like hippie chicks.

First, without the OP, Dumbass would have been the most domineering personality and that yahoo would have been dictating everything.

Second, Dumbass had become completely intransigent, and on a point where there is no real room for disagreement, no less. In a better group, OP and the others would all have been equally strong personalities and equally willing to contribute ideas. In a somewhat less idiotic group, it would have been OP and the non-Dumbass version of Dumbass working something out on a debatable point while the other two floated on OK. As it was, OP had to hit his head against the brick wall of Dumbass’s idiocy and go behind the idiot’s back just to create a project which met minimal standards of correctness and sanity.

So the scenario provided in the OP was questionable. The OP’s group, however, was even more questionable, and forced OP into it.

Naw, naw, guy has a point. I really like Dr. Seuss – short, sweet, and to the point, well written, witty, and he was a neat artist!

But eventually I graduated to chapter books, y’know?

And I wrote a letter to H.P. Lovecraft, sayin, “Hey, dude, I like the whole Eldritch Horror thing, but your books are just too dry and stale, y’know? Y’think you could, like, edit 'em down to something readable?”

He did not reply, due to having been dead for forty years, but I felt I’d made my point. I then wrote a similar letter to Stephen King, complaining about the sheer length and mass of his books, these enormous doorstopper things, even in paperback, and asked if he couldn’t, y’know, cut to the chase, so maybe people would READ the things?

He sent me a letter on parchment, specially modified to fit his solid gold, jewel encrusted, fur lined word processor’s printer. It read, “To whom it may concern: Eat my shorts.”

It was printed in real gold ink. Worse than that, it was a form letter.

His loss. If he’d taken my advice, people might actually buy his books…

I think you should change your name, Master, to “If you don’t like stories and have no sensahuma, don’t click here.”

I will never understand people on message boards complaining that there’s too much to read.
LOVE these stories!

There’s a difference between a long story and a looong story. If your eye glides over it and drinks it up in ten seconds flat, such as the case in the OP, well that’s good writing.

You know what group projects teach you - “I hate everyone” (stole that from the internet)

Well, we only have MK-W’s take on what happened, and it sounds like he went into the project with a fair degree of intransigence, himself. As for Miss Sunshine and Hippie Chick bowing out of the final presentation, I have to wonder if they were really the slackers the OP makes them out to be, or if they’d been so cowed by the process that they felt the final result didn’t reflect their views or have any of their input.

Tabby Cat, will you be my editor? You said briefly and succinctly in one sentence what I meant in one hefty sarcasm-laden post. I am way too much in love with the sound of my own keyboard, so to speak.

And yeah, I might have been a bit of a grouch. I was also ten years older than any of my group partners. But durnit, experience has taught me that to put my grade in the hands of others is to flirt with disaster. I’ve had too many white nights, doin’ a project in a terrified frenzy, all because some other vaporhead left it to the last minute, and whoops, this bottle of bourbon fell over and spilled in my mouth, and now I’m hurlin’ like a French Canadian at the Winter Olympics…

Oh, wait. That’s curling. Never mind…

Expenditures, you need to update your corporatespeak.

But they’re pretty obviously idiots who are offended by words in common usage, or their enablers. So, what did they offer?

Me, I would have stated at the beginning of the “slave” controversy that they could sit it out if they liked, but any report that I issued on the subject was going to have slave in the first sentence, last sentence, and probably just about every sentence in between. I might get a failing grade for not getting along with you assholes, but I’m not going to pretend you have a point on my way to getting it.

Now, that’s an empty threat, as I wasn’t going to be issuing any such report. There’s too many people like Master Wang-Ka out there who’ll do the group project for me. And anyway, I was probably going to drop out of class long before any report would be due.

I’m not proud of that last part, but that’s probably how it would have worked out.

Now that I’m an old fart, I can give you my perspective on group projects. When in school, they sucked hard and deeply. Basically the teacher told us to choose our own teams (first fail because then the teams were just cliques), and then turned us loose to organize the work ourselves. That was fail numbers three through ten. Kids don’t know how to organize themselves into properly functioning teams without some coaching. The kid who knows how to do the work will do it all, and the rest will sleep in. If one of the kids doesn’t like this, if he pushes back he’ll be ignored by both the team and the teacher.

It teaches kids nothing about how to work on group projects, and it also does not echo real life projects in the work world. Here’s how those go:

Management assigns people to the team, usually based on skills but occasionally there is favoritism. But mostly by skills. Management also expects frequent status reports on progress or demonstration of milestones being achieved. If someone doesn’t do their work, management can be called upon to apply discipline. Once assigned to the team, you know what your role is and what to do to accomplish it. There is sometimes conflict or lazy people, but far far less than in school.

If you bring an issue to the teacher, he will tell you to work it out yourself. If you bring an issue to management, they will call a meeting to resolve the problem.

First, the OP is totally wrong about group projects, here in the real world. Group projects may have hundreds of people working on them. You may get somewhat judged on your own merit, but often if the project dies you go with it. Saying “I did a great job arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” don’t cut it.

Second the group projects I did in grad school were too big for one person to do - even me. There are plenty of good reasons for them besides making life for the teacher easier.

Third learning how to do with the kind of crap in the OP is important. When I was at Intel everyone had to a class about how to deal with conflict in meetings.
Maybe Dumbass could have been assigned to collect data or draw graphs or pictures where the S word was never mentioned. Maybe you could have told Dumbass that you would abide by the teacher’s decision about the use of the word, and send him off to tell the teacher that the word slave was offensive. That would have been interesting. Or vote on use of the term. Or tell him that he can issue an individual report without it, while the other three would do the group report.
Maybe teachers don’t need to do group work, but if you are now a teacher how would you resolve this problem if you had knowledge of it?

One presumes that he refrains from assigning group projects.

Beyond that, in school, assholes and other toxic sorts get more or less free reign to be that way, while in the workplace, the aforementioned status updates and discipline tend to make everyone toe the cooperative line.

I mean, I had a grad school group research paper with a 6 person group- each person wrote a set of paragraphs about a topic. As coordinator/editor (I wrote the intro and conclusion, and generally formatted and edited), I specified that we were to use the MLA standards for citations (in-text citations and end-notes).

I got a crazy quilt of badly done MLA endnotes with no citations, citations with no end notes, and some weird foreign footnote style.

What was my recourse? Try and slap it all into MLA format and take my lumps on that part of the paper. In the real world, had I been in charge, I’d have taken that to their managers (or our manager) and explained how that shit wouldn’t fly. Or if I had the ability to administer some kind of discipline, I’d have done so. At any rate, a big project wouldn’t have been allowed to be sub-standard just because someone didn’t feel like paying attention to the standards.

If nothing else, there’d have been a post-mortem if it was unsuccessful, and the guilty parties might be called out.

Or not… but there’s a lot more chance that it would happen in the workplace than a professor retroactively giving one guy in the group a better grade because he bitches about his dumbshit group members not doing what they’re supposed to.

I continue to maintain that the worst phrase ever heard in a school setting was “let’s split up into small groups…”

Seriously?

  1. Group projects that have hundreds of people in a public school setting? Or even a university setting? Love to see what the administration or the parents would say about THAT.

Or did you mean “in a corporate environment?” Perhaps you were. I certainly couldn’t design and build a Chevrolet, all by myself. Plainly, it is a cooperative effort involving hundreds of people. But, then, in a corporate environment, it is my understanding that if you have an idiot who won’t or can’t do his job, you don’t necessarily punish the people in his group who are working their butts off trying to keep the project moving forward. Am I wrong? Does Corporate America just sack entire mobs of people? Or do they attempt to isolate the problem, and deal with… the problem?

It is also my understanding from my work in the private sector that you have a thing called a “project lead” or a “project manager.” He’s the guy you go to when something goes banana shaped, or when you have a jerkoff who hasn’t shown up for work in a week. The “project manager,” when it exists at all in an academic setting, is usually a member of the group given responsibility and no authority, and simply told to “make it magically happen” when he complains to the prof that it isn’t coming together.

…hence the reason I’d just do the damn thing myself. I would rather permit other people to leech off my efforts, as opposed to allowing them to drag me down into failing territory. I do resent the kind of asshead instructor who enforces this nonsense, and I therefore do not follow that example myself.

  1. My experience with grad school is limited; do they have to design and build a Chevrolet from scratch, or something? And what are these reasons of which you speak? It would be nice to know them, as opposed to simply thinking that the instructor cannot be bothered.

  2. It’s nice to know your employers sponsored classes in conflict resolution. In my case, this was never offered; you learned to deal with conflict when some idiot caused it, and you clawed your way through it. Or in my case, just did the damn thing myself. I do not find this effective, personally, although it worked for me. Plainly, I am responsible for unleashing hordes of idiots and stubborn types upon the world without having learned THEIR lesson. I blame my teachers.

I think a man should have to learn to resolve conflicts, sure. That doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to send someone over to his house to ring the doorbell and kick him in the nuts. Particularly if, when he calls the cops for a little justice, he is told, “Hey, you just need to arbitrate your own conflicts, man.”

It is no better when you’re sending someone over to kick him in the nuts three or four times every semester. This isn’t teaching. This is lazy bullshit.

And to answer your final question, I MANAGE THE GODDAMN PROJECTS, and I see to it that each student is responsible for a portion of the finished project… and when the kid doing Part C is being an ass, I don’t punish A, B, and D.

But I guess they do things differently at Intel. You’ll have to let me know.

I maintain that the group dynamics of any group I have been in for a school project look like this.

Group gets assigned.
Everyone figures out who wants the A the most and who is most capable of getting it (usually the same person)
That person does most of the work.

You tend, in a group of four, to get one competent person, one well intentioned person who will contribute, one well intentioned person whose contributions will need to be reworked and cause the competent person more hindrance than help - whom the competent person will also end up teaching, and the forth guy who rides along for the group grade.

As previously stated, the only reason I can see to do this is when one can’t be bothered with teaching, and is happy to offload the responsibility onto a competent student, who really has no choice if he wants to get the grade.

Puts me in mind of another group project, in fact, under an extremely well known professor of education, with many professional awards and honors.

I signed up for that professor’s class. Wanna get taught by the BEST! Wanna learn the secrets of the master!

And discovered that my entire grade would be based on two things:

  1. A group project.
  2. Attendance.

And we spent the entire semester assembling the group project. Occasionally, the professor showed a film. And the last several weeks, we filled the class periods with the group presentations.

I can’t say anything bad about my group. They were good people. I did not have to do the whole thing myself, and they were neither obstinate nor stupid. Rather clever folks, in fact.

But I did not learn a stinkin’ thing in that class that I did not already know. And the university charged us quite a bit for the privilege of teaching EACH OTHER.

Really? If I were teaching, I’d rather have a few hours of in-person interview with the last 4 or 5 National Teacher of the Year award recipients in my subject area ( or grade if K-5).

Those who can teach, teach. Those who can’t, teach teachers how. LOL but seriously, if you taught high school math, wouldn’t you rather hang out with Jaime Escalante than some PhD who teaches classes to future math teachers? if you had to pick just one.