When I went to college, I had a computer science professor who assigned a group project, and he also told us exactly how to do a group project. You know, how to organize it, how to distribute work, how to have meetings and report progress, etc.
That was the first time any teacher had ever explained anything to me about the group itself. The professor thought it was a good way of introducing students to the way things are done in a workplace, and he was right. Group projects are hard. If the students have to figure it out themselves, they will screw it up royally, just like anybody would.
I honestly believe that every teacher I had up until that point had no interest in using group projects to actually educate the students. It was just a break so that the teacher could pretend like they were teaching students to work in a group, but actually added little scholastic value for students. (There was some inherent value in the socialization aspects, but the teacher never told us to do that, either.)
If teachers don’t teach, then it’s only luck if students end up learning.
Something that irked me about college was that professors assumed/expected all of us to know certain things coming into first semester classes. Like writing college level seminars, which were required for most classes. We had no intro whatsoever on the topic. I’d personally never had anything like it in high school (essays yes, seminars no), and my HS was one of the top schools in the city.
Absolutely the same with group work. I think for some it was an easy thing to check off the list, while others assumed students had prior experience/knowledge.
I had one professor that couldn’t comprehend why so few students had bought the book for day 1 of class. He was shocked to learn that other professors would require a book and never actually use it.
Another one actually checked for the book at the beginning of the semester as a graded assignment and proceeded to never mention it again. When a girl asked about it mid-semster, he said it was “supplemental reading” we were supposed to do on our own time. She went off on his ass, reminding him the book cost $300 and all that.
Essays are another complaint I have about my grade school experience. Especially for English class. They never told me exactly why it helped me to write an essay, and so I felt like I had to guess what I was learning. I always thought it was about grammar and spelling, and that they wanted all of that literary shit like allusions and tone and whatever.
I knew that it was okay if you wrote something creative, but it sucked shit, but I didn’t realize that they wanted us to write shit sucking creative prose, because most everybody has to write badly before they can write goodly. I was always paralyzed by perfectionism, and in those days, we either wrote it by hand or on a typewriter, so it was hard to go back and edit.
Just watched an episode of a TV series which this was a plot point. The person who did nothing was upset he didn’t get to contribute.
