Group Projects Suck! (Lara's Rant)

Group Projects for speech classes should be banned! Last week my speech class decided on the topic of Lowering the Drinking Age. I'm in the group that does not want the drinking age lowered. So last week we thought of all the different categories we needed to discuss, and people chose which they wanted to do their part of the speech on. So... I signed up to discredit any possible reasons the other group would have for lowering the drinking age. We called this the Rebuttals, though it is not a debate forum.

I spent the week working on my speech for this category, and getting my sources all lined up, and only used the most credible. (While MADD has a lot of good information, I didn't think that was the most reliable source for credible statistics - not that they make things up, but you know...) So I got my information together, wrote my speech and went to class.

Rod decided he is going to lead the "meeting of the minds" we're having and starts going through the information that he found. He had little bits of everything, and other people who brought stuff had little bits of everything, most had nothing, and I had my one topic. Rod Says, "I want to do the rebuttals," I say "I've already done the rebuttals." We banter this about for a few minutes, when we all agree to get our outlined made up. Rod starts doing an outline, he wants to put the entire speech together right there. Everyone else is lost and confused and getting frustrated, but he claims he knows exactly what he's doing and again states that he's doing rebuttals, though last week, he wanted to do the brain development of young adults.

So after about an hour and half of not getting anywhere with Rod leading, I start assigning people topics to cover again. Rod's persistent that he's doing Rebuttals, so I take my neatly organized research, staple it in order toss it across the table and say, "There you go, I've done all the research for you." Then I tear my speech out of my notebook and slide it across the table and say, "Oh, yeah, I've already written the speech for you too." So now I'm writing another speech for the conclusion, and probably on brain development too since the girl I assigned that to, insisted on doing her section on fetal alcohol syndrome ??? I told her she needs to find stats on teenage mothers and drinking, and she wants to know why because alcohol has an effect on all babies no matter the mom's age.

So I tried to hide my obvious frustration by as kindly as I could explaining to her that we are trying to persuade our audience to not vote to lower the drinking age, and pregnant women above the age 21 having alcohol in no way supported not lowering the drinking age. She didn't get it. The instructor found it very amusing, he finally said we could be dismissed, and we dismissed. grr.... it's really not that hard.

And just to note how lazy some people are, we assigned one guy to be in charge of creating a PowerPoint. And a couple girls thought all they had to do was find the information and email it to him and he would write the speech on the PowerPoint. It is a speech class people, you have to give a part of the speech.