Group projects & the absolute failure of the education system

2022-09-16 15:05:41

I had to do another group project. Yes, another. On top of my recent hellish experience of slopping together a cringeworthy brutal horror short film, I just now had to do a presentation in a media class. I'll call it "a media class" because I mistook one class for another, as they are all interchangeable.

This project was to do a boring ass presentation on a brand and how they present themselves on social media. Snooooreee. It had to be done, let's see what horrible grade and cringeworthy feedback I get.

So for starters, I was partnered up with even more incompetent and unenthusiastic morons than with the aforementioned film project. I knew we had issues when I was considered male by the other girl in the group, with her indirectly saying "because I'm the only girl". Uh oh, well, that's what I get for having very short hair. All inklings of feminity tossed out the window.

For starters. There was lack of enthusiasm.

One participant was excruciatingly slow but what was unforgivable was how blatantly apathetic he was. He showed absolutely no ounce of engagement in his posture, voice or contributions to the actual content.

He dragged the final presentation down greatly. The other guy attempted to tell him he needed to speak quicker or cut down what he was saying. The culprit mumbled and surfed Facebook on his phone during our one hour booked room session, a great use of our precious time.

This guy gets under my skin a lot, maybe just as much as the next person I'll talk about.

Secondly, was displayed a lack of intelligence.

These kids obviously had never written a single thoughtful sentence in all of their miserable lives. Scratch that, never had they ever edited a Google doc from what I could tell. The other girl in the group besides me kept copying and pasting useless scraps in random places. Without actually contributing anything.

She edited the slideshow disasterously the night before we had to record. When confronted, she told me she was "making it cohesive". Um, by duplicating a slide seven times and moving images into the space (I had told them was the) required OBS webcam alloted area? No thank you. You were doing diddly squat nothing to add to the actual content.

This leads me to say, I was the one writing the script, finding sources and putting in effort, obviously. To my chagrin none of them really honed the script like I thought they would. Heck, they didn't even follow it when presenting and therefore ended up with a plethora of ums and ahs.

Lastly, they were masters of bullshitting.

I told them to practice reading their parts outloud. I couldn't bloody tell if any of them attempted to do this. *Name redacted* the other redhead in the group (who couldn't tell I was a girl), obviously made up an excuse about her grandpa dying as a reason to no go to class, I'm sorry but I don't trust her. She missed around two classes then pops up second to last week and smugly stares at me as if in total acceptance that she need not contribute jack-fucking-shit anything.

I fucking hated her face.

I am appalled at the laziness, no, idiocracy, of Adelaide University students, a school that prides itself on being of high quality. If lesser students freeloading off a hard working one in order to get a grade is considered acceptable, then I have lost faith in this school.

Basically, it was all up to me. To pull together something. But I had wanted to trust in them to put in effort. They fucking didn't. Didn't do diddly shit nothing.

"have you finished the script @ velanoble"?

Dear teachers and course coordinators, please stop tossing group projects into all your classes. They are unfair for individuals that work hard to get paired up with downright insulting buffoons. Using the excuse that we need to "learn how to deal with others" is fine and dandy untill you are expected to cover the ass of a human formed granite slab.

I'm sick of this. Being graded based on multiple losers that didn't put in enthusiasm, nor show the intelligence required to resourcefully prepare a decent speech.

I hope I have gotten most of my angst out by mentioning this.

We did a disaster of a presentation on Haigh's chocolates. I had created a fake persona to represent Instagram consumers of Haigh's chocolates and assigned her the name Katrina and made her a young student who visited Adelaide while a tourist, and that is why she follows the chocolate company.

Someone in our group found stock images, I presume it was the one boy I atleast got along with. The photo was of an Asian girl. Alright, looks like a decent slide show, or so I thought. When finally watching back the video in the full classroom, I wondered. Is this racist? Is it racist to say they are a tourist and Asian? Is it simply racist to have the two labels overlapping, I suddenly felt a chunk in my dry throat. Oh no. Had I done it again, not been with the times. Maybe I had inadvertently pissed off the Asians in the room.

Being an Asian is fine. And being a tourist is fine, but then why is it I suddenly got too late how maybe someone would be offended?