ext time I volunteer to put together a group project, shoot me, k?
It doesn’t end up working too well when people don’t send you the stuff in time to do a good job. I mean, I gave them the weekend. I figured I’d be nice, let them get it to me by Monday (since I was unlikely to do anything on it until then) and that would be enough. It’s an upper-division class, I figured people would be more responsible than they were last time I was in charge of editing together a paper (which was my Freshman year–I’ve put together other projects, but nothing that had to be cohesive).
RONG.
The first part came Monday night around 9:00. It was well written, but contained no source references and made no attempt to connect the information on slavery in the 18th century to the issue at hand (which is a novel called The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson by Edward Kimber, which no one has ever heard of).
Next came information on Anglo-French relations in the first half of the 18th century, at about 10:30 Monday night. Except that the student, in his own words: “I basically just typed what was most relevent to the history on it and the time period we’re working with. They are basically verbatim out of the books, as to not distort what really happened (if I paraphrased, it would be a dissaster). So, feel free to put in your own words to flow with the rest of the group paper.” Ah. So, I’m supposed to take your research and paraphrase it myself. Uh-huh. I thought that was your job. So I get into it and discover: it’s all about the French and Indian War (Seven Years War) of 1754-1763. Except that the book was published in 1754, and is set in the early 18th century, between Queen Anne’s War (The War of the Spanish Succession) from 1702-1713 and King George’s War (The War of the Austrian Succession) from 1744-1748. Right. So now, I get to do the research he should have done, so that our paper actually covers something relevant. Also, the sources he quoted? He gave me titles, but nothing else. No author, no page numbers, nothing. Great. I basically ignored all his stuff.
Tuesday morning comes, and I get the third part of the project. This part is beautiful: proofread, correctly typeset, complete with Works Cited page and parenthetical references, and makes the effort to connect the information (on the ‘man of feeling’ character type in the mid-to-late 18th century) to the novel, everything. Yay.
But I still need one more piece.
And it doesn’t come.
So I send a reminder e-mail.
Nothing.
Then, at 6:30, I get an e-mail from the person who hasn’t sent me anything resending the slavery part for another student, saying that the other student wasn’t sure if it came through, and, oh, she’ll send her part as soon as possible.
Which turned out to be at 10:15 last night.
The paper was due at 12:00 today. And I had an 8:00 AM chiropractor’s appointment, and a 10:00 AM class.
GAH.
And when I opened it, it was good and well-written, but repeated a lot of stuff I’d already talked about (since I tried to get as much done as possible while waiting), so I had to basically re-write everything I’d done.
Never. Again.
At least it’s out of my hands now.
In other news, my back is much better, I have a total of ONE class left in the semester, I am going to VEG as much as possible tonight, and Jen and I have a bout of good, hard playing scheduled for Saturday. The semester is almost over