Group Work

We have all had to work in groups. Some of us love it and some of us hate it.

Right now I am finding absolutely nothing worse in university than group work! I thought group work would be better than high school group work. I thought that because I was with like-minded people who wanted to study what they were studying that group work would have been the best thing to be a part of. I really did. Boy, was I wrong!

I have just completed one group project and that had its ups and downs but… just… wow. It was hard. The people were good though, they were understanding and we didn’t dwell too much on something for too long. Once we performed our piece, everything fell into place. The hard work, frustration and annoyance paid off. The piece, I felt, was great.

I’m in another group now and I thought the piece before was hard. Let me just tell you, this one is the epitome of terrible. And there are only four girls in the group!! Including me!! I thought girls would have more control, more power and strength to actually compose a great piece but wooow! I was so wrong! I have nagged and nagged and tried to get things done, the problem now is that I look like that one bitch who is trying to control everything. Lets just get one thing clear, I’m no control freak. For a month before this upcoming exam I nagged these girls to get together and practise something. In the beginning I was relaxed, I asked a couple of times to rehearse and just before the planned practise someone would cancel for the day. This happened almost every time and two weeks ago my group and I had to perform a final piece to our class just for criticism from our lecturers.

The different groups went up and I sunk deeper and deeper into my rabbit hole of embarrassment. All the group’s pieces looked like they had been rehearsing for weeks. Their pieces were great. Some lacked commitment and energy but they had substantial pieces that you could see actually had been worked on. By the time our group was called on stage I was ready to evaporate into thin air.

With absolutely no rehearsals behind us, one person absent because she was ‘sick’, me having to act the absent person’s lines as well as my own and one person only reading her lines, we went up on stage. I expected a disaster. We introduced ourselves and performed our piece which was basically just the lines. We looked dead but we got through it. I was surprised we did.

The teachers criticised all the groups work. You could see they tried to give us some good feedback but I couldn’t blame them when all they could come up with was that they were glad we still managed to do the piece with someone being absent. The criticism on the other hand was a page full of notes. I wrote it all down. I put it on our group chat hoping that the people in the group would look at that and have a heartfelt moment and realise that they need to start committing. Sadly, I expected too much.

Now I sit writing this post at 10 o’ clock when rehearsal was supposed to start at 9:30. Our group organised to meet today on Sunday. We agreed on it, as we have many times before. buuuuuut someone has an ear infection today and another person can only get here at 12. It takes me an hour to get to school, if I am lucky, and I got here at 7 a.m because that was the time my transport had to get to where he needed to be, only to learn that rehearsal will start at 12, if even.

Think it’s going to happen? I’m sure you can understand my frustration and if you have some advice on how to cope with it plleeeaasee feel free to comment.

Oh, I forgot to mention an important detail. Our exam piece is due this Thursday, in two days from now.