Group Projects

In my Intermediate Fiction class, I just completed something I haven't done in any of my other writing courses--a group project. Like the rest of my writing courses, Intermediate Fiction is divided between workshopping people in the class and reading published works. Each group in our class is leading the discussion on two authors. Today, my group had to lead conversation and activity around two David Foster Wallace short stories. I was a little bit worried that I wouldn't contribute enough, because I wasn't leading a section on my own, but I think I was able to ask some interesting questions as well as respond to some of the questions my other group members raised. What I liked about this group project was that it was not nearly as stressful as many I've done!

My Thought & The Natural Sciences course also relies on group projects. For tomorrow, we need to turni n the next stage of our end-of-unit group project. Our professor gave us a lot of freedom as to the topic and medium of our projects. My team ended up choosing to do vlogs, or video blogs, of different scientists involved in aviation, in order to convey biographical information about these scientists as well as scientific concepts. I am playing Daniel Bernoulli. Aviation was before his time, but the Bernoulli principle became very important in flight. Our last due date we all turned in outlines of our research. Tonight I need to write my video script so I can hand that in. The next stage will be actually filming my video, which will be interesting--I feel like I need to find a good costume!

For Friday we also have to come up with an idea for an experiment we could conduct as a team. We're still in the brainstorming stage, but we are leaning towards something to do with psychology.

Usually, I'm very wary of group projects, but for both these classes, I've had good group members. I have yet to really feel my normal group project stress. I hope that I can continue warding that off as our group begins a new project in science.