The Five Stages of Group Project Grief

Does anyone here like group projects? If you do, you’re either a liar or the reason for this speech in the first place. A very intelligent poet named William Langland once said, “Patience is a Virtue”. I am, unfortunately, not a virtuous person, nor have I ever made any pathetic, floundering attempt to be, which is especially true in the group projects of today.

I have been described as passive-aggressive, and maybe even not-so-passively aggressive at times. They say, “Bossiness is not a trait for leaders” and scorn me for the way I organize things, but how dare they when they’re the sole reason? What else am I meant to be when I am surrounded by the most grossly inadequate creatures of my life every single day, forced to slave away to do my part and theirs because they can’t?

In my opinion, there are five stages of a group project. One for every stage of grief, of course.

The first stage is one I like to call, “The Great Divide”, or denial, in which the teacher announces the project and the groups. I, by my horrendously bad luck, am lumped with the most socially inept people of the Earth. We sit in the far corner of the classroom, and then it can go one of two ways; either, there’s an awkwardly long, tense silence that settles over us like a blanket before I elect to pretend they don’t exist and begin planning on my own, or they immediately start babbling about grossly unrelated topics and I…elect to pretend they don’t exist and begin planning on my own. In any case, I deny their presence for the sake of my own sanity, because I’d much rather act like this is an individual project than wrangle them like I am their mother.

On the rare occasion that I do manage to coax them, like I would a toddler, to participate, we move onto the second stage: Planning–if you can call it that. Like clowns at a circus, chaos immediately ensues–everyone talks over each other even if they have nothing of essence to say, simply aiming to fill the space with noise. And then someone’s on their phone, another has disappeared like the wind, the third is ranting about what they have planned for the weekend, and oh, they’ll be so busy that they won’t be able to work on the project–it’s okay if you shoulder their weight, right? Eventually, I am left fuming and with the impossible task of formulating something that vaguely resembles a plan in the last five minutes of class. Everyone ends up agreeing to something half-baked—”Sure, I’ll research this, you do the slides, and we’ll have a meeting later,” which translates to, “I’ll never do my part, you’re going to end up doing all the work, and we’ll all pretend to be surprised when the deadline hits.”

Stage three is predictably, the actual project itself, of which I’ve dubbed: “What am I even doing?”. Everyone has their respective workloads by now, and everything is clear, right? Wrong. Someone will claim the research portion and subsequently fall off the face of the Earth for the next two weeks, the person in charge of slides is going to forget what the project is about in the first place and what their role is, and there’s always one person stuck in their bed like a sickly Victorian child plagued with the scarlet fever. Still, everyone insists that they’ve got their part down, that they don’t need the help I offer. At this point, I’ve rightfully given up on any hope of collaboration and start to wonder if I could beg my teacher to separate from my group and do the entire project myself, because no matter how devastatingly bad it will be, it would at least be done.

Now comes the fourth stage: “Insanity”. I’m inconsolable at this point. The research person never reappears and the slides person sends an incomplete mess of a powerpoint, both of which I fix late into the night because no one asked for help and everyone ensured that they had it covered. And then it’s the last stage, time for presentations. Everyone is scrambling to practice parts that they didn’t write. I feel like I’ve aged at least ten years in the past two weeks, and I’ve long since accepted that my mark is going to plummet. That’s why I think all group projects should be completely eliminated from schools. They waste our time, stress us out, and allow the lazy to ride on the coattails of those who actually do the work.

Thank you.