Week 5

I was in a group in highschool called FCCLA, and the group of people that we had were only in it because it was a requirement for our Internship class. They did not want to do any of the work, we were assigned committees and there were committee leaders. I was in charge of the Fund Raising and Volunteer work, and because none of the group members really cared about anything, they did not listen to a word I said, and nothing really got accomplished. They were very social with each other and formed cliques and were very excited to meet up because they wanted to share the latest gossip. This is a prime example of groupthink because it shows that they were more into the idea of being in a group than actually wanting to be a part of something and work for it. I really ended up hating FCCLA just because of the people in it. I loved the idea and I loved what we did, but the immature highschool seniors (yes seniors) were acting like 12 year olds and were not willing to put in any effort outside of school. So a few of us, mainly the committee leaders, ended up doing all of the work ourselfs to get ready for competition and we won prizes for our FCCLA group. My teacher however, was also fed up with the other kids not not helping and decided that they did not get any of the prizes, and would not be invited to our pizza and ice cream party (which was actually pretty amazing) so there was only about 10 of us there. She then lectured us for 45 minutes the next day about how we are all going out into the real world and in college we will be expected to work our buts off and do our work outside of class.
I can honestly say that I have never seen my teacher that mad before. She felt as though she had let us down because her job was to prepare us for college, by the end of the year she had proclaimed that besides a few of us, this was the worst class/group that she had EVER had. Even though I know that I did my part and the part of many others, and that I was more mature and realistic than most of the others, I still felt as though I had let her down as well.

Honestly, I do not remember ever being a part of a productive group. I have always been a part of a group and I am usually the leader, because nobody else would step up and do it; so I usually end up doing more than my share of the work, if not all of it. I had a really screwed up highschool class with alot of people who did not care about anything, so whenever we would have group assignments, if they even showed up for the group meetings, they did very little to contribute. I would try to spit out ideas and ask what they thought and I would always hear "Well you are the smart one, do what you think will get us an A". I would often talk to my teachers about how none of them would contribute and how I stayed up late the night before to complete it by myself and they would blame me and say that I had failed as a leader because by doing the work I was encouraging them to NOT do the work. I thought that this was dumb because I did the work because I did not want my grade to suffer.

Question: What would you do if you had an enormous group project and you got stuck with all of the work because you want a good grade?