Monday, March 17, 2008

It takes one to know one
I felt miserable for the thing I did yesterday. Miserable not because I regreted and definitly not because I wronged him. Just that it is not my nature to solve things this way and it was uneasy for me to do so.
And so, I am not ashame to share with everyone what i had written, and i hope YOU will never treat your group like this when you are doing the project:

"Dear Dr XX,

This is Tan Tengda from your HW210 class, C22 group blue-tec.

I am sad and regret to be the one informing you of our group problem regarding one of our group member, YY.

The rest of the group member felt morally obligated to bring this up to you for it is just irresponsible for us not to.

Our group dynamics may not be the as good as the others since we do not know each other before hand. However, most of us tried our best to put in the required effort for the project.

Yet, we felt that YY did not put in the necessary contributions for the project and feel that this problem should be addressed.

Firstly, during the start of the project while doing the information sourcing and literature review. It was evident that YY did not contribute any information. Initially, we felt that it was just the beginning and hence overlooked this issue.

Subsequently, during discussion. We felt that he was not following in our conversation much and was not really attentive to the ideas mentioned.
This was evident when he was assigned to edit chapter 1 (introduction- purpose) of our report as we were out of track. Despite it was just a short paragraph regarding our project's purpose, the ideas he edited were not what was discussed. Eventually had to be re edited.

Our group felt that this incident may be due to his poor understanding and usage of english language. Thus, attempted to assign him to do up some of the visuals we need for chapter 3. Unfortunately, this had not been done so as well.

During this period while working together, he did not display any initiative and was not proactive in our discussion. There was totally no insightful input from him other than occasional saying out some trival ideas we had already discussed before. And if I am not wrong, he is the only student who does not have any 'stars' from your class. ( teacher gives stars for student who activitly answers her questions) Such attitude towards education and doing project is seriously not acceptable.

The above cases can be attributed to his personality as well as incapability of working in groups. Indeed, as members from his group, we were more than willing to guide him along or even to cover up for him. Nevertheless, what hurts us most was when we found out that he lied to us about his absence from group meetings.

A message was received from YY saying that he was outside and was unable to attend to the meeting. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we assumed he had personal matters to attend hence did not question him. Fortunately or unfortunately, he was spotted by follow group member, ZZ who arrived late due to the rain, in school's canteen.

We were totally hurt by his actions and were even wondering if the reasons his absence from previous meetings were even true.

As this is the first time we encounter such situation and it was really uneasy for us to bring this up to you. Hence, we really wanted some advise regarding this matter.

Once again, I really appreciate your advise regarding this trvial issue of ours and thank you for looking into this matter.


Thank you.

Regards,
Tan Tengda
CBE Yr 1"

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I unexpectedly met Darmen at 12 noon today. My emotion wasnt that good due to this incident. He himself wasnt having a good day either. Nonetheless, he was willing to hear my side of the story.

"I used to be very self consious,"he begain to say,"Everytime people sees me not in a way i wanted, I would be very worried and try to change their perception of me. But later I came to realise that I cant be friends with everybody, there are bound to be enemies. There is no way you can totally change this. You did everything you can within your power to solve this, but this is something you have to do to put things right. Hence you should not be sorry for what you had done."

And this is really the words i want to hear. Someone to affirm my decisions. Not that i am swayed easily by anyone, but sometimes it is just the support that is needed to know that our method to fight for the greater good is the right one.

"Idea is the thing that shapes a person, not his culture or background. There is always a choice and no one can be forced to do anything."-- poorly adapted from darmen. Cant remember the exact phrasing.. hmm..

Labels: friends, school

Catching the falling leaves ...[1:37 PM]

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