The Whine thread.

[Aquarius]

Thanks! I hope to have Chapter One of "Body and Katra" completed and Chapter Two well under way by the time I leave there. (yeah, I really AM that slow!).

In the meantime, "Sex, Lies, and Soundproofing Material" is in beta...

[Alelou]

You know it's bad when the company that holds your IRA starts out its weekly economic round-up with this line: "The economy keeps belching out bad news." (The reality sucks, but I love the line.)

In a whine follow-up: No, it wasn't something my husband ate, judging from the way my son decorated a great deal of the carpet upstairs at 2 o'clock this morning. This morning the school attendance officer laughed jovially and said, "You can count on two days."

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

^ It seems it could be the Norovirus. Over here we call this disease the Winter Vomiting Disease ("vinterkräksjuka").

[Bether6074]

Well, there sure isn't anything funny about it. All of the laundry and constant handwashing...It's no fun having a sick kid. Hope everyone feels better soon.

[Aquarius]

Something like that was going around the Detroit area over Christmas time. One of our nail techs got it, her kids got it, and finally her husband got it--so badly they admitted him to the hospital. Then like a week later another nail tech got it, one hairdresser, and another hairdresser's husband. I was so worried because I had that awful sinus/cold/cough thing for three weeks right after Thanksgiving, and I thought I was vulnerable, but maybe my immune system was on overdrive so I didn't get it.

I sure hope everyone feels better soon. It seems like the bugs we get are weirder and weirder, and they last longer and longer.

[Alelou]

^ It seems it could be the Norovirus. Over here we call this disease the Winter Vomiting Disease ("vinterkräksjuka").

Wow, that's interesting. Jaime is O and he was miserable for two full days. According to wikipedia (which is a big caveat I suppose) O gives you a predisposition to catching it. and supposedly having type B or AB confers some immunity. But I think Alejandro and I are both A. Oh well.

It would be nice to think maybe I'm not utterly doomed. Bether is right about all the hand washing, the carpet cleaning, then there's the ginger ale fetching, the ice cube smashing, and the jello-making. I HAD been taking all the sterile precautions until we decided it must have been the sausage, and then I went right ahead and cuddled with Jaime's sick blanket...

[Pitseleh]

Ok, my whine for the day: I hate group works. I seriously do. And after today, I loathe them. Fridays are a tough day for me 'cause my first class starts at 7.30am and my last class finishes at 9.00pm. So, needless to say, I'm stuck in school all day long... Well, besides that, today I had group presentations in two of my three classes. For the first class, each sub-group within the group was supposed to present some sort of banner or presentation with their area of reserach on it. The largest sub-group (led by the head of the group) was supposed to make a study of the area in which our project would be developed. Then, the rest of the sub-groups would extent on the info they had established... Well, they didn't do ANYTHING. No banner, no pictures, no info, no nothing... Oh, I'm seriously angry at this people. My professor wasn't happy either....

Then, at night, one of the members of the group decided not to show up without any kind of explanation regarding why, no matter that she had to present a chapter of the book we were assigned... Seriously, respect for your classmates and a sense of responsibility is lost on these people.

[JadziaKathryn]

Hey, some of us were having a discussion about this after one of my seminars yesterday. We were whining about group work, and I have a theory on why a lot of high-achieving students end up hating group work. In middle school and high school a lot of times teachers try to put the good students with some slackers so it's even. And since the slackers, by definition, don't do much work, us high achievers ended up taking over so things got done well. (I wasn't happy about it, but I wasn't going to let someone drag down my grades!) So by graduate level, I am completely used to being the one in charge and suspicious of group work on principle, besides set in my ways.

And yes, I know collaboration is an important skill. (Though rather less so in history.) I even know teachers are trying to prepare us for the real world, such as it is. I'm just saying, there are unintended side effects.

That being said, your day sounds absurdly long, and I hope you get individual grades! Individual grades for group projects are, IMHO, one of the best ideas since scaled grading. Maybe better.

[Alelou]

You think it's bad in school, wait until you're in a real job and your group work has bottom line consequences. You have fewer outright nonperformers in a real job since they tend to get fired pretty quickly, but in my experience you still get to deal with procrastinators, over-promisers, people who are terrified of making a decision or supporting it once it is made, and worst of all your conniving sneaky types. You just have to hope the latter doesn't include your boss or a boss's protege.

Having said that, a good group can really feed off each other to create something much better than they would otherwise. I normally prefer to just sit in a little room and write copy, but I enjoyed a lot of the ad agency collaboration last year.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Hey, some of us were having a discussion about this after one of my seminars yesterday. We were whining about group work, and I have a theory on why a lot of high-achieving students end up hating group work. In middle school and high school a lot of times teachers try to put the good students with some slackers so it's even. And since the slackers, by definition, don't do much work, us high achievers ended up taking over so things got done well. (I wasn't happy about it, but I wasn't going to let someone drag down my grades!) So by graduate level, I am completely used to being the one in charge and suspicious of group work on principle, besides set in my ways.

Exactly right! That was how I experienced it too when I was at school (much less so at university; maybe I was just lucky having good mates then) and I hated group assignments.

Thankfully at work nowadays I'm pretty much by myself, totally in control with what I do.

I know many teachers have this idealised view that when they put high-achievers and slackers together everyone will rise to the occasion. Wrong! Besides, I don't think it's the job of high achieving students to help and/or motivate the slackers. That's a terrible burden to lay on a kid. That's the the teacher's job!

[Alelou]

Having been one of those teachers, I'd say there are pros and cons and I doubt the teacher is looking for the overall level of a group to rise more than she's looking for them to all get actively invested in something instead of sitting there like passive lumps. I do think groups work better in advanced classes. I once split my honors English class and set them to adapting an extremely abridged version of "The Tempest" for a modern production and I don't think I've ever had more fun. One group did "Here on Caliban's Isle" a la Gilligan's Island and the other turned it into a mobster story. They were wonderful!

But you just never know. One year my elective drama class blew me away performing anything I set them, so full of energy and fun and very supportive of each other. We did so much in that class, way beyond the syllabus, because THEY wanted to do it. The next year there were a bunch of lazy slackers who refused to even learn their lines. There were a few talented kids in there but oh man, it was depressing.

[Pitseleh]

I didn't have that many group assignments in high school, and back then, I had a pretty great group to work with. I've hated the whole group work experience in college--way too many slackers. And I'm really beginning to to hate people who not only don't take decisions but then decide to criticize the decision the group has made. Seriously, lead, follow, or get out of the freaking way! Anyway, we managed to do the night presentation without trouble (conveniently skipping the missing person's chapter without the professor noticing), but we have to re-do the morning presentation for Tuesday. We're suppossed to meet in school on Monday to check on what everyone has done, hopefully this time everyone will work...

I wonder what would happen if you made a group out of slackers? I guess the'd be forced to actually work given the sink or swim situation. That would perhaps work better than putting over-achievers with them, and making us stress like hell (as if over-achieveres weren't stressed already).

[Alelou]

In my experience your average slacker group just finds creative and noisy new ways to slack when they're put together, though occasionally they'll rise to the occasion. Some slackers are quite bright, just lazy and popular and quick to take advantage of others if they can. Maybe there ought to be an element of group grading in which each member can anonymously rate the contribution of each of the others.

[JadziaKathryn]

Maybe there ought to be an element of group grading in which each member can anonymously rate the contribution of each of the others.

Some teachers do, and I am all for that.

[Aquarius]

I always hated group assignments, too, for the above-mentioned reasons, as well as the popularity pecking order, at least in high school.

In college I came to hate them for new and improved reasons. In one of my broadcasting classes, we had a group assignment where we had to make and edit a radio commercial, and we were put in groups of three. I was in a group with a girl and one other guy. Any time we set up meetings at the library, the guy never showed up. Then as the due date got closer, I didn't hear from the girl...turns out she got very ill and had to drop all her classes. I still couldn't get hold of the other fella, so I went to the prof and explained that I was going to have a hard time turning a group assignment if I had no one to BE a group with. He informed me that the guy in the group did his own assignment as an individual because (and I really LOVED this) supposedly the other girl and I never showed up to the meetings!

He let me do my own. I got a C.