This was the worst. I had people I knew in class but generally I’ve always been considered one of the less important friends to people. So I would watch them all pair with someone they liked better.
I’m actually currently having a minor anxiety attack remembering this 🤦♂️
Sending positive energies
I’ll be your lab partner next time. I might overshare regarding progmetal, networks, the oxford comma, and server clusters, but that comes with the territory.
I dreaded this not because I wouldn’t get picked and feel left out; but because group work always either became:
- Me doing all the work myself because my partner(s) fucked off
- Me not having any work to do and being bored out of my mind because my partner(s) took all the tasks and left me with nothing to do because they thought I would bring them down.
To this day, I still prefer to work alone.
I was a shitty kid. I would threaten not to do anything if I was forced to pair up because I hated it so much. I’d follow through and fail, too. I hated pretty much everything about my school.
I actually enjoy group work at a company with people who enjoy what they do. It’s very collaborative and you can make good friends.
This was my strategy every time. It never worked out great, because there’s usually a reason people don’t want to be paired up with whoever you end up with.
Yeah, but anything to not experience rejection. Wish I could go back and teach my younger self how to not give a fuck about that.
This happened to me every single time except once.
AP Chemistry, senior year of high school, I was in a class with a girl who was tall, blonde, and would go on to be one of our valedictorians. (We had 8 that year, don’t even ask me.) She was also literally prom queen one of the prior years. We were picking lab partners and it was understood that your partner would be your partner the whole year.
To this day I don’t know why she picked me, but we fucking crushed those labs.
Thank God this doesn’t happen to me anymore as an adult
Me
When I was a kid I hated group projects and always tried to work on my own because it was a binary choice between “the other ones will completely fuck everything up and dick around the entire time while I try to salvage the project” or “I will be a burden to the group and contribute nothing, I will bring shame upon my bloodline”. There was no in between
Honestly kind of like group projects when you work as a developer too…
University group projects, however, are completely fine.
That’s how you get paired with the teacher.
It’s how I got paired into a group of three. I’ve never even heard of anyone getting paired with the teacher.
I feel attacked.
It got to the point I just started asking the teacher if I could just be my own group.
Better to single yourself out than let everyone do it for you.
They’d all get pissed when I won review games though.
