Recently, we have been working on a project about daily life in ancient Egypt. There are a few things I would like to address about how I worked with my group and what helped me with this project.
I don't think in-class activities helped me much during this project, mainly because the things we did were too subtle to notice. I didn't notice much activity going on during the project, other then the project itself. Basically, we just were told to"research ancient Egypt." This is a very broad category if you ask me, so most of my group was pretty much clueless in the beginning of the project. When we finally did do something, my group had a pretty solid script outline, and we were told to go add something we learned to our project. This made the script kind of awkward, and we didn't really ever include it in the final project either. It would have helped if we did some of the extra research before the project, not after.
I would have liked to know more about Egyptian culture before I started this project. I know this seems like a really broad topic, but when we wrote the script, we didn't know if a soldier would really be friends with a scribe, etc. Knowing about how other people treated each other in ancient Egypt would have been nice. This is because we were trying to make our characters seem like real people. Obviously, we missed the mark a bit and our script came out a bit awkward. It probably would have made us more sure of ourselves when we wrote the script if we knew what these people were actually like.
Our group was mostly successful working together. Of course, we had the usual group arguments sometimes about who got what part, etc., but we always ended up resolving them. In a way, working out these arguments made us better able to work together and brought us closer together as a group. We were very good at making sure we were all happy, and able to be a good part of our group.
However, even though we were working well together, doesn't mean that we were all doing the same share of work. I would say RIB and I were doing the most work, but PAC was at least trying. He ended up making a large impact on the final product, though because he designed an awesome poster. RIB did so much work I feel bad for him, but in a way, he put it upon himself. When we do projects together, usually RIB goes home and does almost all the work. Really, he's just resilient and likes to feel like he contributed to the project. At least that's what I think. One of our group members, however, did not put in the necessary contribution. BM. He barely did any of the work and he was playing video games almost the whole time. I am not very happy with him.
If I got a chance to redo the project, I would change a lot of things. Firstly, I would try to make the script less awkward, and more funny. I would try to develop my ideas before scrawling them out in a rush. I wouldn't be afraid to have homework because of this. After all, it's better to have a lot of homework then a bad script. I would also prompt BM to do more work. I would help him work it out with our group and help him understand that we need his help to make our projects even better then they already are.
Honestly, I don't think our project was very successful. I felt like we were always on a time crunch, like there was always more to do, and the work kept adding up. I wonder how the other groups were able to produce such great scripts in a matter of days. Weren't they on a time crunch too? I would definitely like more time to complete projects such as this in the future. I know Ms. Morris was trying to test our limits by having us do projects like this on such short notice, but my limit is way behind the point that we struggled to. I would think about "The Project" even when I wasn't at school, thinking about it while brushing my teeth, lying in bed, and sometimes even playing a video game or watching T.V. My point is that since the time limit was so stressful, my group didn't get as much done. If this had changed, we would have been able to produce a better project.
I understand this was a much faster timeline than you guys have previously had in my class. The real difficulty in your group seemed to be absences during critical moments as well as one group member who didn't do as much, which ultimately yielded a group that just didn't come together well.
ReplyDeleteI do think that some of the stress could have been alleviated had you decided to make the awkward parts of the script work out on your own - as you said, you were thinking about it at home a lot anyway. I know you want things to be perfect and aren't happy when they aren't, and part of being a group leader (because you have natural leadership capabilities) is sometimes taking that kind of thing on yourself.
I'd also comment that the way the project started was much less "go research ancient egypt" and much more "here are eight websites I've chosen that are helpful. Read them and take notes on a graphic organiser, then talk about them and see what you still need to know to understand the lives of average ancient Egyptians." :-)