November - the 4-legged monster

Posted by Krystyna Hunt in

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The slide presentation on the History of Travel Writing is my first exposure to a learning phenomenon I have not yet personally experienced. Four people work together to produce one assignment. It really is like a 4-legged monster with uneven legs and no sense of direction, but we are all a part of it and we all have to make those 4 legs arrive together on a specific date. If a leg drops off or wanders in a different direction, the other legs have to take up the slack.

I am so grateful that Joanne understands this factoid perfectly. The others say, "oh, it's not fair we shouldn't make decisions until everyone is here." Or, "everybody should have the same vote" meaning we should vote on decisions over and over again until everyone is there and understands and has had a chance to research what is being voted on. A nice idea, but if we only have two weeks to do this and members of the group don't attend 90% of the meetings, it doesn't work very well.

Prof Marilyn has thundered, "If anyone is not pulling their weight on this project I want to know. I will not have my D students pulling my A students down!"

So, on it went. Only Joanne and I were showed up at each meeting. Dayna and Ashley were either working part-time, partying, sleeping, weren't coming into class that day or somehow never showed up at a meeting even if they had been reminded to an hour earlier.

I had no idea if everyone would be there at the presentation. I had covered travel books, Joanne covered newspaper travel sections, Ashley covered National Geographic Magazine and Dayna the travel magazines post 1900 to the present time. Until Dayna and Ashley started showing up for meetings Joanne and I were prepared to go up and only show our parts of the presentation.

Marilyn had wanted us to spread reading and showing the slides equally timed between all 4 people, but we just never got together enough times to work that out seamlessly. So we agreed to just read our own. Joanne's and my section took 15 minutes of our 20 minute allotment, the other 2 took the other 5 minutes.