Oh man, so I know everyone hates group projects with ample good reason, but lemme just tell you something that happened to me in my final year of uni. My dad got real sick and was in and out of hospital numerous times, one time with a suspected heart attack. Which meant my mum ended up caring for my dad, and I wound up caring for my disabled brother, on top of working a part time job and going to university full time.
My grades slid dramatically. I was having to appeal nearly all my results with my professors, and was mercifully granted extensions by all but one of them. (Which, if you’re out there Ronald: stub your toe and step on lego for the rest of eternity.) And then our Revolutionary Cultures prof. assigned a group project, and paired us at random with our classmates. And I knew, I knew I was just going to be a dead weight so I went to my new buddy and told them we should go to the profs office and ask for her to be switched to someone else who wasn’t just going to drag them down. And my new best buddy for the rest of the semester looked at me, looked at our assigned project, and very gently started to cry as she told me “I was just about to say the same thing to you,” and then tearfully told me her mum was dying, and the only reason she hadn’t dropped out to take care of her was because her mum wanted to see her graduate. She’d been given six months and we graduated in five. Provided we finished this class. And we were both out of appeals and leniency time.
It’s probably one of my most vivid memories from the whole college experience, just sitting on the floor of the Renaissance Lit corridor hugging someone who until a moment ago had been a relative stranger known only in passing, and trying to tell them it would be okay, we’d get the paper done. And we did. We scraped a C- together between the two of us and we managed to coast over the passing mark for the class and were allowed to graduate with abysmal but passing marks.
And I still think about her all the time. Especially when I wind up in group projects for work, and it feels like no one else is shouldering any of the burden, I make a note to reach out and say “hey, you don’t seem to be engaging with this much, are you okay?”
And a lot of the time it shocks people. They’re not expecting earnest concern for their lack of interest, and you find out things like their kid is sick, their dog just died, they’ve got health issues going on, or sometimes they just don’t know where to begin with the project and didn’t want to tell you that because they were frightened of being judged or perceived as lazy when they’re just overwhelmed.
And I honestly wish things like this were taught in team building exercises, cause that’s what group projects in school are. They’re supposed to be teaching you how to work well with others and achieve a common goal, while at the same time totally skipping over the fundamentals of human interaction and how to engage socially with others, and it’s fucking bullshit.
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