Group Project

Today I'm frustrated about journal-writing, because, honest to god, when is there time for journal-writing?!

But I'll talk about group work as I wait for my group to email me something useful. Anything useful. I guess I was a little overly-ambitious in the beginning of this project when I suggested to my group that we split everything up, hammer out first drafts that first week, then spend the remaining time casually editing and improving our product. That didn't even come close to happening.

Instead I’ve found myself begging them for submissions, and not getting very far since the reason/excuse for not writing sections on time is that power was out, they have no internet credit, etc. Those might be completely legitimate reasons, but man, they’re frustrating.

One of the tasks assigned to Person #1, who teaches at the school where we’ve sited our greenhouse project, was to get a map of the general area and of the school compound (buildings, latrines, sports fields, etc.). So, he took literally 2 weeks to do that, claiming that he couldn’t access even Google maps in that time. Then this week he showed up with a huge smile and clear sense of satisfaction as he presented me with a looseleaf sheet of paper – blue lines and everything – on which he’d pencil-drawn a diagram of the school. That… was not very helpful. But by now I’ve changed my attitude about rewriting and fixing their work to meet my standards, because I don’t think that’s fair OF me to do to my colleagues nor is it fair FOR me to have all that extra work to do. So I decided to use his map as it was - I took a photo of it, just darkened the lines on the computer and saved it as an attachment. It’s really a lot easier to do that then to redo the entire map. No more redoing things. No more redoing things. I’m committing to that mantra as a way of protecting my own sanity.