Group Projects

Ladies and Gentlemen, for the first time in several months, I slept in! That's right. 8 am! It was glorious and actually it put me in a rather good mood today. Surprising what sleep can do for you.

So Tuesday we had our peer editing groups as you may have read from the previous post. I was super nervous about it, but it turns out they liked my paper. I was hoping for some more suggestions for my paper but it was helpful to hear that they thought I had a good paper. I still am not fully convinced so I am having Holly proof my paper tonight (turns out she loves proofing papers). Class today went really well. Since we are wrapping up our papers (oh yeah, she extended the due date to Tuesday which means I can breathe a little), my professor broke us into our groups for our group project. The project is a 30 minute presentation having to do with Themes of Feminism. Let's be honest, I hate group projects! Maybe it's cause I have never had a good group. There is always the weak link (someone who never meets with the group, doesn't do their share, or just doesn't understand English and therefore can't participate the way you would like them to). In my case this time it's the third. We have this lady in our group who is probably in her late 50s and is from China. Not only is English her second language, but she also rarely ever uses a computer and doesn't know how to do research properly (or at all for that matter). Now, I don't have anything against people of more advanced ages going back to school to finish up their degrees. I think it's great! Let's be honest, I may be one of them someday if I can't finish this stuff up. But what I struggle with is that she speaks very broken English and most of the time I don't understand what she's talking about and more then that, I am pretty sure she has no idea what I am talking about. It's hard to trust her with parts of the project when we are all going to get the same grade for the presentation... The other part I hate about group projects is trying to find a leader. While the project doesn't actually require assigning a leader, it's nice to have someone initiating conversations and getting everyone on the same page. I don't really like being that person. I would much rather let someone else do that job, but it seems in every group I am in, no one else will step up, causing me to take charge.

The group situation is actually not all that bad though. We chose to talk about Women in Music which is a SUPER broad topic and we are each taking this weekend to narrow the topic to a direction we as a group may take. I am thinking of talking about women as singer-songwriters and talk a little about Janis Joplin and other artists who kinda paved the way for women as singer-songwriters today. The other idea I have is to talk about women as musicians in bands. I was watching an episode of SNL a few months ago when Beyonce preformed and I remember being kinda shocked by her all girls band. It's not something we really see a lot of and it got me thinking about specific instruments that are considered more masculine (trumpet, sax, electric guitar, drums, base...) and then the instruments that are more feminine (flute, clarinet, piano...). I guess I'm just really excited about the topic and the freedom we have in this project that it makes me really excited about working with the people in my group, even if I have to be the leader and carry the one lady in my group.