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Have any of you been paired up with a partner or put in a group where getting any input or work from them is like trying to get a box of rocks to play fetch? Share your worst group/partner stories.

Mine is right now, being partnered with an individual for my spanish improvision dialogue. I honostly believe that I could get more response talking to a couch. On top of this I have to work with her because 1/3 of my Spanish Final final grade depends on this dialogue. At very least I find relief in imagining her being torn to shreds by a pack of rabid squirls...

Try just about any high school science lab (or hell, any group project) where the teacher only accepts one composite work from the entire group. One or two people get stuck doing the whole fucking thing, while everyone else just clings along to get a good grade.

My High School Physics teacher, on his first year on the job (poor guy, I really did feel sorry for the shit he had to put up with), did that constantly. In my class, the handful of bright or competant students got stuck with basically the entire workload of the fucking class while everyone else just goofed off. We'd do the lab, collect the data, then everyone in the group would go, "Oh, you're so good at math, why don't you do it?" "I don't like math," "I'm not that good at math," "I'd just fuck it up," "I've got so much else to do, there's no way I could do all of those equations and graphs."

Everyone in my lab group always seemed to have some sort of excuse as to why they couldn't do the analysis. Everyone wanted to do the preface or the data listing or the conclusions. Even then, they'd basically have someone else provide them with everything they needed to do those parts, so they'd do as little work as possible. It's one thing to try and get input, but when you ask the guy who did the analysis what the conclusions were, then proceed to write down what he says word for word, your only job is that of a secretary.

2nd year Comp Sci oral report project, where I was the only person in my group who could speak or understand English. The rest of my group spoke Chinese which I don't understand, and none of them could string more than 5 words together when they tried to speak English, nor could they understand anything I said unless...I...spoke...very...slow...and...used...small...words...and...repeated everything several times while doing lots of hand gestures. Worst part is a third of my class was like that. I live in Canada damnit, and English is our official language. How the fuck do people get into 2nd year university classes with Kindergarten level English skills? And they're not Visa students, they're landed immigrants with Canadian citizenship for fuck's sake? How the hell did they become citizens without even knowing how to speak our language?

I ended up doing almost all the work for the presentation and even had to write up scripts for the dipshits to read since everyone had to say something during the presentation. Never mind the fact that they didn't understand a damn thing about what was on the scripts, the fact was reading from a script was the only way they could string a coherent sentence together. I could've written "I'm a FOB who can't speak English and I'm here to leach off your social security programs and waste your taxpayer's dollars" on the scripts and they would've read that out loud to the entire class without even understanding it.

Larz wrote:Have any of you been paired up with a partner or put in a group where getting any input or work from them is like trying to get a box of rocks to play fetch? Share your worst group/partner stories.

Mine is right now, being partnered with an individual for my spanish improvision dialogue. I honostly believe that I could get more response talking to a couch. On top of this I have to work with her because 1/3 of my Spanish Final final grade depends on this dialogue. At very least I find relief in imagining her being torn to shreds by a pack of rabid squirls...

I rarely do any work in a group. I prefer to work alone.
I used to do all the work. . . then I went to highschool.

I'm one of these people who not only likes to do a good job, and not only seems to be a natural leader, and not only is unable to trust other people to do an adequate job, but I can't say no to anything, so in any group project, it's always me actually doing it.