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It tends to make for treble-length sermons.
This is the sort of customer "service" which drives the customer away, Father Steve.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Different religious cultures produce different expectations about sermon length. My sense is that the average Episcopalian begins to squirm in the pew after about fifteen minutes. I was once invited to preach at an African Methodist Episcopal Church. The pastor told me that their tradition was to preach longer sermons than we Anglicans preach. I worked hard and produced a sermon of 45-minutes duration. After the service, many of the members of the congregation shook my hand and were very gracious, but several asked "Why did you stop preaching when you were just getting warmed up?"
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"Why did you stop preaching when you were just getting warmed up?"
One culture's sermon is another culture's sermonizing, Father Steve.
In either case, it's always better to leave them praying for more.
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stranger
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Absolutely Fabulous!
I have pondered and pondered these same issues. A young girl, of half asian descent, half Italian/Irish...I felt I didn't fit. I wondered about the magic popularity formula for most of school age years. I was kind, smart and my friends thought I was funny...
Ahh, now as an adult I watch the youth of today. One thing is apparent; this is a lack of understanding and depth on the part of those adolescent popu-lar-ites. They may suffer the same evils but the difference lies in the analysis of the evil as well as the ability to contemplate your place in the resolution of the problems that plague you. I used to just call it shallow but that's derogatory. I think it is more a cerebral ability to pick apart the "fake" the "phony" and question why?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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re:A young girl, of half asian descent, half Italian/Irish...I felt I didn't fit.
she rah, welcome home! we like to say, there are no rules around here, but fact is, the people who fit best here are those that often didn't (or still don't) fit well in most places.
the most interesting discussions are provoked by someone with an 'outsider's' view looking at and questioning something (a word, an idiom, an expression), that, we all take for granted (or if you prefer, that we take for granite!-some of us are pretty hard headed!) as insiders, in someway.
most of us are pretty adept at looking at things from the outsider's point of view, because we have all been (and in someways continue to be) outsiders in some way, shape or form ourselves.
look forward to hearing more from you!
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I used to just call it shallow but that's derogatory. I think it is more a cerebral ability to pick apart the "fake" the "phony" and question why?
And these are not hallmarks of shallowness? 'Derogatory' and 'factual' are not mutually exclusive.
My daughter is half asian on her mother's side (chinese) and half european miscegenation on my side (french, german, irish). She's experiencing this turmoil in high school as I type. I don't know that she's particularly intellectual at this point, but she loves math, works hard in every subject, and has achieved a measure of success in each of them (straight As first quarter).
In her only class with upperclassmen, the other students in her group weren't doing any work. Example, they're sent to the computer lab to do 'research' and all the other kids surf the net for music while she does all the research. Then they have the gall to shower her with phrases like "fucking bitch," "you're just a nerd" and "you'll never have any friends" and many other helpful comments because she won't write the opening speech for the group's cheerleader. My daughter's response: "If I write it, I deliver it."
(One of the biggest crocks of nonsense in high school and college is the need for group projects - and particularly the utterly stupid way it's implemented in most cases.)
k
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Ok, your daughter received straight A's, is in classes with upperclassmen and refuses to be the silenced brain of this particular bully (assumed) popular group...now what is the question? I feel for her and seriously can say I've been there. She knows she is a hard worker and they want to exploit her talent and her work. She holds true to her beliefs in herself by refusing to be "their" brain, while knowing she will suffer their belittling cries.
I say Hooray!!!!!!! You've got a winner. Bravo! She is strong, smart and I adore the spirit!
I am an instructional specialist for the eleventh largest school district in the United States. I know there is value in the cooperation and collaboration between groups of people that are different. This is the trend the business world has asked the public school system to address. Educators need to give students opportunities to work together.
Why? because that is the real world of today.
I understand the objection to the "Group" project...but who is learning the valuable life lessons here? Your daughter is the one. Painful as they may be she is learning the most difficult lessons and she is getting straight A's in standing up for her self, her abilities, her talents and acceptance of who she is!
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She made straight As by the skin of her teeth, and no thanks to the slackers. She didn't learn anything about working in groups that she didn't already know. Somehow I don't think this "put them all together and let them sort it out" paradigm is that the business community had in mind. I want her to learn the subject material and be graded - FAIRLY - on whether or not she learnt it.
If I had wanted her to learn that life is unfair, I might simply have payed someone to break her legs. If I had wanted her to learn that people will steal her work from her, I could have emptied her room of all origami and other little things she's made for herself. If I had wanted her to learn that people will take credit for her work, I could have made some appropriate arrangement. What *IS* the lesson? And how does it relate to the subject being taught? As it turned out the cheerleader was eventually persuaded to do her work. Had that not transpired, my daughter would have been faced with a choice: do the work for her OR chance getting a lesser grade (giving her a B for the semester). She got lucky. Sure she stood up to the bullying - but it was pure luck that it worked out. It seems to me there are clear messages being sent here:
1) If you're smart, you'll learn your place as the workhorse of the group.
2) If you're lazy, you'll learn that you can coerce others to do your work (thereby guarranteeing yourself a place in the management track?)
I will say that the biology teacher has figured out a workable pardigm. They work in small groups during class, but everybody gets graded on their own work. This is a rare teacher among those who use the group paradigm who has figured this out.
But we have digressed from the issue of nerdliness. Sometimes this is might be used as a term of endearment, but usually it's intended to be a nasty comment. I'm reminded of that idiotic movie 'Revenge of the Nerds.' You see John Goodman and these others sneering the word 'nerd' or spitting it out and you think that it's an exaggeration of the current state of affairs. But it's not.
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Pooh-Bah
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I'm sad that your daughter has become the target of bullies, FF. Nobody needs or deserves that. I'm assuming that you can't do anything about it except be supportive.
But just because her school or teacher doesn't know how to run group projects doesn't mean to say that they are useless or that they can't be run properly. I used to run group projects when I was a lecturer, and the way I had them set up no one could avoid doing his or her own work - or if he or she did, it would show. Each member of the group always had to do a vive voce presentation of his or her part of the project, and as part of that he or she had to show how that work had enabled the overall group objective to be met. You can't bullshit that - you have to know what you're talking about.
I weighted the individual marks around content, presentation and the vive. Each part had to be passed at the 70% level for the student to pass. The group mark was actually only 25% over the overall outcome. Believe me, after the first project, the process was taken very seriously, and the students found out the hard way that I wasn't an easy touch. The first semester I did this, I had a 25% failure rate. Nearly all of the fails came from the viva voce, because it only took a few questions to demonstrate that the student hadn't actually done the work himself. The second and subsequent semesters had a very low failure rate because the students were on to the process and did the hard yards ...
I'm sure there are other ways of doing it as well.
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I'm not saying that group projects are always a bad thing. In her particular class - debate - it's a necessary thing. Your method addresses something that is a deep concern of my kids' - people taking credit for their work. I didn't ever care about that myself. I always thought - 'Hey, you can give everyone in the class an A for all I care, but I wanna have learnt something at the end of it.'
My daughter can handle the feeble attempts at bullying - in fact, she's not at all upset by it. She's kinduva a big girl - and by her attitude and size the other kids assumed she was a senior. They were a bit surprised to find out she was only a freshman. I'm more indignant at the thought that these are the popular kids and they might easily get more nasty. OTOH, things seemed to have calmed down considerably.
In the past when I have worked on group projects, it always seems there are only a few people who do all the work. In my last college course, there were two group projects. In the first I did all the work - which I didn't mind. Everyone got As - which I didn't mind. However, I had to go down twice a week to meet with the 'team' and these guys screwed around the whole time - and never one time did anything they said they would do. I was intensely irritated. Two of the group already knew java - I had to teach myself (course requirement which I ignored). It would have made much more sense for one of them to help design the project. This was a huge chunk of time outta the week and it nearly kilt me. For second class, I told prof, "Look, you can fail me if you want, but I'm doing the next project by myself." "But it's way to too much work for one person," he said. I'm doing all the work anyway, I said. Harder project and less work, because I didn't waste hours of every week explaining stuff to people who were perfectly capable and perfectly unwilling to do anything. It wasn't all THAT bad - one girl was very smart, worked hard, but couldn't program (no idea why they made her take a graduate course in operating systems). But the other two had no excuse.
If there are N people, I never expect everyone to do 1/N amount of work. But I do expect everyone to work hard to make some contribution. In this project, I did the design, I did the implementation, I set up the test cases, I did the analyses, I wrote the final report. Ironically, the girl who didn't know very much was the biggest help. I could actually talk things through with her. She'd come up with some vague idea I'd shoot down. This was most helpful with the homework problems. God were they hard. Every week - ten problems. On average, each problem would take about 30 minutes just to understand it - and some of them twice that. When I'd call her on Mondays, she'd have put considerable effort into nearly every problem. On several problems I think her approach was better or more thorough than my own. Considering her lack of background, this feat impressed me. Contrast this with the goof-offs who had very good experience going into the course. First, they knew java (for the programming part). Second, they were still in graduate school, so a lot of things were still fresh in their minds and they had all the basic stuff outta the way. When I called them, they had generally not even attempted the problems. It was a one-way braindump. Again, I don't mind this if it didn't take time. As I don't care about anyone else's grades, I would have been happy to fax my homework to them, but the requirement was to discuss the stuff which would take a coupla hours a week (in addition to the projects).
I learned more in the course than any other I've ever taken. It was also the hardest course I've ever taken. But it didn't have to be so painful. And it wouldn't have been had I not been stuck with goof offs. Now I could have settled for just doing a fair portion of the work and turning in a non-working a project - or not doing the research part or no paper. But I was determined to get an A no matter what. Whether anyone else got an A or F, whether they got what they deserved or anything like that is not my concern.
This was not my first experience with group work. It was my last, though, and it was also the absolute worst.
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