Back in the Junior College (JC) life, doing Project
Work (PW) in groups of five was a special memory for most of the students. Many
teammates developed their friendship after the PW as well. However, PW was not
really a beautiful memory for my group.
At first, things were going very smooth and without
much effort, we submitted our Preliminary Idea to our supervisor successfully.
But later when we needed to dig deeper into our topic and expand the width and
depth of our proposal, we found that a guy in our group, Robert, were often
late for more than half an hour for our meetings. Besides, during our
discussion, he was quiet for most of the time when the rest of us were
brainstorming ideas. In fact, he even fell asleep sometimes during our
discussion. When we asked him for an explanation, he told us that he was the
only one who lived in the east. And the meeting was always held in the west
because the rest of us lived nearby. And he had to wake up very early to attend
the meeting. Despite being a little doubtful that he was only using this as an
excuse, we accepted his explanation.
Unfortunately, this was not the end of the story. As we
moved on to the second half of the year, we found that Robert was making less
contribution to the project than before. He was still very unpunctual for
meeting; he hardly opened his mouth during group discussion; and he even
stopped doing his part of the group proposal. We thought about reporting this
problem to the supervisor, but we were afraid that this would reflect badly to
our group. To finish the project, the four of us had to make up Robert’s part. Our
team went into a mess and none of us received a good grade for PW.
Do you think there’s anything we could have done
better?
