Group Projects

Group projects=fail. In my opinion.

In a group project, everyone is supposed to pull some of the weight, right? Hence, the word GROUP. Well, it usually doesn’t work out that way. Let me break it down (aka Let me find an excuse to make a list).

• The Actor - This is the guy who acts like they do everything. Like if the teacher is walking around they’re like “Oh, wait, maybe I should start doing something so it looks like I’m totally helping out.” So the teacher will come by and they’ll be like, “K GUYS SOOO we should do THIS for our project, okay, everyone listen up!” And everyone else in the group is like, “Buddy, you might be in Drama but you really aren’t fooling anyone.”
• The Intense One - They’re way too into the assignment. Like INTENSELY into it. I had to work with someone like this in the simplest of group assignments — a Health worksheet — and everytime we’d start talking he’d get this intensely angry look in his eyes and be like, “Guys, can you STOP TALKING?!” And we’d just be like, “Dude, it’s a group assignment. Like we’re gonna talk.” Yeah…I think he had some ~issues~.
• The Legit One - This person actually does work. They’re the one that makes the group get stuff done, but without being The Intense One. In other words, they probably do most of it themselves because it’s too much effort getting the other slackers in the group to do stuff.
• The Slacker – Self-explanatory. They don’t do crap. They sit around, usually with another slacker, fooling off and being like, “K, so we done yet?” And then they get an A because The Legit One does an amazing job.
  …. not that I’m bitter or anything.

Basically, the reason I hate group projects is because one person always ends up getting screwed over and one person always ends up getting out of doing anything and they get the same grade. I know that there’s usually that “Individual Evaluation” junk  but teachers are stupid. They’re like, “Oh, everyone looked they were working…ALRIGHT A’S ALL AROUND!”

We have to do a History project that’s worth 200 points, which is basically the equivalent of two test grades. We’re allowed to work alone, but we’re also allowed to work in groups of two or three. I’ve had a few offers, but I’ve turned them all down, even my friends. Because the thing I hate more than group projects in school are group projects outside of school. Figuring out when everyone’s free to work on it, who’s going to do what when, when and where to meet BLAH BLAH BLAH. So I’d rather just work alone because I don’t have to coordinate with people and rely on people to get the job done. Two of my friends asked me if I wanted to be in a group with them because if I didn’t accept, “they’d actually have to do work.” So let me get this straight. You want me to be in your group so I can do the work for you? PRECISELY! Right, so a perfect reason why I’m going to say no. I know that they’d do some work, but I also know that I’d be the one coming up with most of the ideas and that’s just going to be obnoxious

So overall, I think that teachers would get a more accurate measure of what kids do if there weren’t group projects. I like working in groups in school for short assignments, but for big things there’s way too much pressure to get it done right for me to rely on other people to get me a good grade.

College Already?

Today, I had a meeting with my guidance counselor to “arrange” my classes for next year. First of all, I told my mom that I had such meeting, the date, and the time, which I figured was a given. Like, I’m not going to NOT tell my mom that I don’t have a meeting that’s going to plan out my classes for all of next year. Unfortunately, I was sorely mistaken as a few of my friends who think they are SO COOL (a few days ago, they were talking about Pokemon, obviously, the height of coolness) starting going “WHADDA NOOB, YOU’RE SUCH A NERD.” You just said noob. And I’M the nerd. ANYWAY, the point is I don’t think most kids’ parents came to their meeting.

After I told my mom this, she, after establishing that she could make it, said, “I have a few questions.”

Translation: The meeting will take forever.

So clearly this was a mistake on my part. I should have approached the situation in a more cunning way. The meeting was called for 8:45, right at the start of gym (hey, I wasn’t complaining about missing square dancing) and I figured, okay, I’ll be back at 9:00, 9:10 AT THE LATEST. I didn’t leave until 9:25. Hence, the reason I called my mother’s presence a “mistake.”

When I got home from school, my mom immediately started talking about colleges, GPA’s, classes, and the like (I could tell she had been thinking and researching all day). I’m taking a pretty challenging set of classes this year, so my GPA isn’t like a 4.0, but it’s not too far off. But then she went all “I went on this website and you can check out the average GPA and colleges and see what they are and SAT’s…”

…my head just started spinning a little.

So I went on the college website or whatever, because, yeah it’s interesting and kind of fun (fine, I am a little bit of a nerd). I don’t have my mind set on any college or anything yet, but my mom and I just clicked on the good ones to get an idea. The average acceptance GPA or whatever was usually a bit higher than mine is right now so my mom (like those Asian parents that those hilarious videos on YouTube make fun of) is all like “You need to bring your GPA up LA LA LA because its all so ‘competitive’ and they only take ‘the best’.”

This starting stressing me out. This is when I realized that college is FREAKISHLY SOON! Like, I just started high school, but I feel like I can’t relax for one second or its all COLLEGE COLLEGE COLLEGE. I feel like a kid still, and I’m going to be in college before I know it. What happened to the time?