Group work...

I spent the afternoon in the kitchen, baking cookies, and listening to my son and a group of kids work on a school assignment.  It was one of those assigned 'group' things.  I always hated those. And, I guess the acorn doesn't fall too far from the tree, as, listening to my sons thinly veiled sarcasms to a member of the group who wasn't even close to pulling his weight, it was clear he hates group work too.  Did anybody love doing group work?  Actually now that I think of it there are probably thousands who loved group work. These would be the stiffs the rest of us were carrying.  The ones who would rather talk, eat, doodle, interrupt than actually do the work in group work.  The problem, basically is human nature.  Some are doers and some are coasters, some are A types and some are B,C, D and E types.  Nothing wrong with those types either...outside of a group.  But you cannot ask all those different types to do any kind of group work and actually expect that the workload will be shared evenly.  Not gonna happen.  It was interesting though, to note, as I pulled rack after rack of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven, that what they were clearly learning in far greater amounts than the actual curricula, was group dynamics.  And that's pretty important stuff.  Life, now that I think about it...is group work, isn't it?

Comments

[Okie Sister]

So true, and how often do we critize the Type that is different than our Type.