Because his paper didn’t do the picture justice.
This may sound like one of those stupid passive-aggressive Facebook status messages where the person is implying something angrily, but doesn’t outright say, “Jeremy, pull your head out of your ass and stop having sex with my girlfriend! I hate you!” In this case, I know my classmate is a good guy, but… ugh.
In our current class, we’ve been split into small groups and there are three things we have to do every week: 1) Write an individual paper about the topic, 2) use everyone’s information and analysis to write a group paper, then 3) make a group presentation. Doesn’t seem too difficult and might be fun in some cases. This group paper… not so fun.
It was about systems theory (I mentioned it back on November 8th) and we were each supposed to observe something. An event, a situation, your neighbor naked in the shower—whatever tickled your fancy. Along with describing it according to systems theory, we were supposed to draw a diagram that included a bunch of elements that had an influence within that system: traffic is bad because rubberneckers crash into each other, Dick Cheney got away with shooting someone in the face because he was the vice president, there’s no steam in the neighbor’s shower because she likes using cold water, etc.
The diagram and the paper were supposed to match. You could look at either one and get the same information with the same relationships of the elements in the system. In this person’s paper, the final page was a very complex and elaborate chart with a lot of items and a lot of arrows. Very dynamic, very informative—I thought it was really good. The section of his paper that coincided with that chart was two paragraphs long.
I was working on the group paper using what we’d all written and sometimes I could copy and paste some of the information. Not in this case. Nope, I had to choose a portion of his diagram on my own and write about that. I finished the paper, sent it out to the group and told them explicitly what I’d used their papers to focus on. Since some of the information overlapped, having people talking about the same stuff during our group presentation wouldn’t leave a good impression, you know?
Once that was done, I had plenty of time to roam around the house, feeling frustrated and angry and doing a lot of swearing inside my head. It was so upsetting, I didn’t even bother trying to watch my neighbor naked in the shower tonight. Yeah, it was that bad.
