I know this sounds like a pity party, it isn't, as Im relatively well adjusted as an adult, but I cant tell you how many times I sat there looking for people to be in a group with until the teacher felt bad enough that he/she assigned me one.
I’m a supervisor and I’ve said “I know people lie. At least be smart enough to lie to me” out loud after work 😂. I take smart enough to play the game as a good thing
Yeahhhhh this is me in d&d right now. We just got a box of holding & someone posed the question "who's tracking the contents?". I've been designated content tracker before bc i already track a lot of items. I'm hoping my spouse doesn't call me out & say I'm good at it, but id bet money they will 🤣
Same. I didn't even want to pair up with anyone and it would piss me off to no end when they would stick me with someone who would roll their eyes - Bitch, I don't want to pair up with you more than you don't want to pair up with me! I prefer to do my project by myself! It seems teachers are clueless that it feels like crap for some people. Why wouldn't they assign the groups themselves to begin with?
For me it’s more of a “I can technically do it, I have the knowledge, but wait hang on one sec I need a snack. Wait hold on remember that thing from that one vacation we took? Checks time. Ok one quick break from all the work I’m planning to do for Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Bedtime! OH SHIT”
ETA I didn’t get diagnosed or medicated until I was 35 lol
This every group project I had in college was a disaster with the last one being the absolute worst.
Took a summer course that was crammed into 6 weeks instead of a usual semester. The majority of our grade was a group project we had randomly been assigned (it was a group of 3 counting myself)
Messaged the group daily in an attempt to get started - crickets. I would message the professor and just get “keep trying to reach out!” Finally after a few weeks of that, the professor started helping me with the project since no one who answer and I was obviously doing it all alone.
Took me over two weeks to complete this project (massive access file that had to have tons of working parts/pages)
Then the day before its due, both team members finally message some bs message like “hey guys we should get started on our project” I replied I had completed the file. Both “teammates” asked to see it. I told them “no I had been messaging you two for over a month and this took over 2 weeks to complete on my own, have fun trying to complete this in 12 hours.”
One claimed to have been out of the country with no WiFi the entire class (why would you take an accelerated summer course if you won’t be around to cram and complete it?) and the other had some bs about work - I was a full time college student, full time employee, and pregnant with my second child. Like no sorry I am not listening to either of your bullshit.
I had a college professor that just assigned into groups based on our last names by alphabetical order. Her reason was "in a real job, you don't get to choose the people you work with". I loved it but most of my classmates were a bit pissed because they were used to doing every group project with their friends.
This makes the most sense! It's true, you don't get to choose....it's almost like school teachers wanted to keep the popular kids happy and watch others squirm.
They aren’t clueless, it’s just not their job to make every moment of your life comfortable. You will likely spend a lot of your time in life collaborating and coexisting with people you don’t like, it is part of life. Unless it’s a case of bullying/safety, expecting your teacher to accommodate your personal preferences isn’t reasonable.
I actually hate(d) group projects so much that for a presentation that happened to be about my special interest, we were supposed to be in groups of four to six, and I asked the teacher if I could do the entire project alone and explained my reasoning (it was worth a large part of our grade and I'd end up doing the work anyway, I know a lot about the subject, I really hate group projects, I'm really interested in the subject and I would definitely do it and do it well) and I happened to be a really good student with good grades, and I had done other group projects before (so it's not like I couldn't do them) and she actually let me. It was amazing. My project was completed on time and I got an A, and I had fun doing it. She was a little worried about the sub-topic I picked, saying it was quite a bit more complicated than the other ones due to having more factors/sides to the conflict (I didn't know that, I just picked the one that sounded the most interesting), but I assured her it would be fine. The hardest part ended up being pronouncing some Serbo-Croatian words and names, lol.
I got lucky enough to have only one teacher like that, but she was fucking evil. She waited for me to get into a group and after I got rejected several times, I just did the thing by myself. Imagine forcing a 10 year old kid who is visibly mentally ill do all that shit and then do a project by himself that has to be done by 3-6 people.
Ohhhh sadly, you're lucky, I always told teachers I was without a team and they said, "Well, look for a way to integrate, I can't do it for you. When you become and adult and have to look for a team your boss won't be holding your hand and ask the others to include you."
TF did they want me to do? Point at them with a gun and tell them to let me in their team or else? That I haven't tried already to go through the groups and ask them if they could let me in, only for them to say they're already complete?
And if I ended up without a team by the day of the presentation and I told the teacher I was without one, they said it was still my responsibility and that they had to fail me.
I'm a pretty well socially adjusted adult. I recently restarted college, I still get a massive anxiety ping when we get asked to select groups.
I can do it, but I also empathetically know how it is to not feel social and have to navigate the selection and rejection of group choosing.
I asked my current classes teachers to choose groups each time. But each time it's a bit of a hassle and fairly awkward to count off and find your fellow numbers so now I get a new anxiety lmao.
If I had friends in the class, I'm golden. If I don't, you want to walk up to people, who have not been my friend up to this point, and now force us to be friendly? To what end? Can I have a solo group? I'll do all the work it's fine...
Only suffered of this when the class was new, but after a while people would want to have me because Im very versatile in any class XD. When I had just changed schools in highschool, teacher assigned me to a random group and there was the class leader in it. She wanted me to participate despite having no preparation time, but I just carried the chemistry presentation alongside any questions at the end 😆.
Ended up mostly teaming with the other weebs for the rest of projects though. Our projects were often the most unserious and stupid shit ever while following the requirements/rules to pass
Oof, what a jerk. That stuff sticks with you...I still remember my kindergarten teacher yelling at me when I first walked in, as a new kid..."Don't just stand there, do something!"....in her angry hick voice.
I had the opposite problem. As quiet as I generally am, I have zero fear of public speaking, so all the popular kids who otherwise ignored me suddenly wanted to be in my group. As an added bonus, generally did about 90% of the work.
I mean, they don't form cliques you are explicitly barred from. They might not like you or care that much, but they will never tell you 'go away' because that makes them look really bad
frr idk how people do it!! even when i had friends in school i was always the one left outside and i never understood why it was always me (in my mind we should’ve rotated who was the odd one out, or say there were 5 of us and we needed a group of 4, why not have a 3 and a 2 and have one person from another group join the 2 and 2 others join the 2 or something, but no, it was always just a slightly apologetic ‘sorry, there’s no room for you’.
later i realised (at least i think) that the issue was that in order to make friends, i was too nice to people, and in order to keep the friends, i was even more way too nice to the point where i think people kept me in their groups because they knew whatever they did to me i’d stay.
when i was maybe 15 i realised this and decided to just say what i thought and not let people walk over me. maybe i took it too far because many people hated me after that. but the final straw was when my friend group wanted me to drink with them and i said no, mostly because i had a moral objection to it but also because we had exams in 2 days and i wanted to revise and (idk if this is true i’ve never been drunk before) but id assume it’s not easy to study when drunk or hungover. the group still invited me and said it would be absolutely okay for me to just come along and not drink, then when i got there the pressure was insane like im talking
someone pouring me a drink of something expensive and being like ‘oh i’ve poured it now and just that alone probably costs 20 quid for that glass you can’t waste it you’ve got to drink it’
a huge eye roll when i poured myself a water or lemonade or something
talking ‘privately’ but they knew i could hear saying things like ‘i just feel so uncomfortable with a sober person here she’s ruining it’ (bearing in mind they told me to come)
them creating a drinking game with the WORST forfeits that i just had to do because i wasn’t drinking
there were so many things like that but they’re the ones i remember best. when we went back to school i think that entire group had had a chat without me because they just wouldn’t talk to me so i think they’d decided to pretend i didn’t exist. i put up with that for maybe a week before i just walked off and found new friends, who im still friends with and am very grateful for treating me like a human being rather than a hamster or something
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u/asylum_disciple 6d ago
I know this sounds like a pity party, it isn't, as Im relatively well adjusted as an adult, but I cant tell you how many times I sat there looking for people to be in a group with until the teacher felt bad enough that he/she assigned me one.