Chapter Thirteen: Group Presentation (~jinghan)

I don’t know about you but group projects aren’t high on my list of favourite sorts of assignments; presentations aren’t too much further up the list. So if I hadn’t been absolutely in love with my breadth subject (Poetics of the Body) the existence of the group project would have been enough to deter me.

You would think that by the time you get out of primary school they would stop making you do group work: something, that from my primary school experience, usually ended in some sort of conversation club where the more study-conscious student (me) fudges all the work so it looks like we have something to present at the end. But you’d be wrong. You would think that by the time you graduate from high school that they would realise that group presentations produce a poor effort result, often with blood and tears along the way as the lazier students and the control-freak student battle it out around the table. But no, that’s not the last you’ll see of team work.

We all knew we had to do a group presentation from the start of semester, but it seemed that the whole class had been happy to blissfully ignore it impeding due date. And when the teacher mentioned said project and the proximity of the presentation day, the furtherest anyone went was to ask their neighbour what they were planning to do, prompting a incoherent response of a vague tossing up of ideas. The vague tossing up of ideas was me, I was hoping someone would say “oh I like that, can I join you?” But for a subject where we only meet up once a week for a tute and a lecture, no one was sure how much familiarity we were allowed to fein with each other.

One guy that I asked about his ideas for the project responded with “I’m going to do it on my own.” It ended my hopes that our discussion would end up in an alliance. But I understood what he was thinking – the difficulty of co-ordinating a project among people that were barely classmates and not much more than strangers was probably going to end up consuming more effort than taking the whole project on one’s own shoulders. (Something we were allowed to, but not encouraged to do in this subject.)

“We’re all just going to end up doing our own thing aren’t we?” another student said, which was even less encouraging.

So as the weeks wound on. And the Project drew closer. I decided to take a final gamble. I turn to the girls whom I had been talking to before class “Hey I’m thinking of maybe doing some vlog or video thing for the project. What do you think?”

I have never vlogged in my life.

“Oh that’s awesome!”

It was encouragement enough. “Uh… do you two want to join me? I mean… I was thinking we would all create our own little section, but then we have a common topic and we sort of splice it together or something. I mean it can be rather flexible, like we do what we want with our contribution…”

If they noticed that I had no clue where I was going with the rest of the idea they didn’t say anything. The idea I had started with, anyway, was that we could each work independently on something at home that wouldn’t take too long to put together for presentation.

“Yeah, I’m in.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Before the day we over we collected one more member to our group, swapped emails, and chose a topic.

“I’ll email you some time today with the plan outline and maybe some dates,” said J* in a some-what controlling manner. I was – well I guess – offended at first, I had assumed that I would have to take on the roll of getting everyone in line, and I felt like that assumed roll had just been stolen from me. Could I trust her to make sure things would happen?

When I got home in the evening, there sitting in my inbox was an email – no two, from J with an outline of the project, what we would try and get done by the end of the week, and in the second email, a weblink with a nice summary of the topic so that we all knew where we were working from. She seemed just as anxious about all this group presentation thing, and had proven her organisation skills beyond questioning. I forced myself relax about the group work thing. Just do your part.

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned what topic we had chosen: Freud’s stages of psychosexual development. My section was on the Genital Stage. Starting to resent the person who came up with the vlogging idea – yeah, me. (Hey, I’m addicted to blogging, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.) So Saturday morning I sat down in front of my computer booted up the web-cam software and started with:

“Okay… I have never vlogged before, and uh… to make this more awkward I’m going to have to talk to you about.. uh… sex.” Many a awkward silences were filmed after this point. Many things had to be re-filmed when I trailed off half way through a sentence unable to collect my thoughts, and distracted by being able to see myself blink on the computer screen. The word “um…” was more than over used. I even considered putting in a word counter for the word “um”. It also exposed how much I smile when I don’t know what other facial feature to wear. I was not born to be an actor, or any other sort of screen personality, oh no.

After hours of trial and error with the camera, (the fading lighting was evident in progressive the video clips, in the last of which I even had to turn on the light,) I finally produced five minutes of something that had the right balance of awkward laughter, and serious camera talk. I turned off my computer with gladness, that was the last of that.

Or not.

Because on Sunday evening, as I lay awake in bed, I realised that people, yes people, people in my group would now have to look at that video. What would they think? Would they think I was some total sleaze ranting on for five minutes about sex? Would they laugh at my camera-awkwardness? Would their parts be really awesome compared to mine? Would their parts be really awful? What would I say? What would they be thinking if they didn’t say anything about mine…

Monday not-so-morning, I put my usb into J’s computer, and we each, in turn, copy our videos into a folder, and import them into iMovie.

“Uh, I’m sorry if it’s just really awkward, I uh… it’s like me talking about sex,” awkward glance around ” for like five minutes…”

“Hey I was doing mine on poop. The word anal could not be more over used.”

We watch the videos nervously probing each other’s reactions. And we finally get to mine.

Oh god I cannot bare watching myself on screen. I bury by head in my arms with a nervous laugh as my voice emits from the computer.

“Mmm…” J makes little nods of agreement to my talk about the book Love Machine that I had described as “enlightening” and then later changed my mind and said “empowering”. Was it was I really meant? I felt I was exposing something that I wasn’t sure I wanted people to see in me.  (Definitely the most awkward part of my presentation.) But she just kept making those I’m-taking-this-seriously “Mmm”s.

“That’ was awesome. It did not feel like five minutes of talking.”

I probably said something awkward in response to this. But I cannot say how relieved I was. If one of my team members wasn’t judging me for what I said, then I could stand whatever everyone else was thinking. Everyone else had done their parts, we had it mostly compiled together with only a few things left to tweak. One of the girls had come in in the morning with a shattered look, as if she was going to confess that she had not completed her part, but all it was, was “I left my USB at home.” We assured her it was nothing to stress about. There’s still one whole week until the project is officially due.

So maybe working in a group doesn’t always have to involve blood, sweat and tears. Perhaps now that we’re in uni we can go about it in a co-operative way. Maybe I’m fooling myself, maybe it’s just the importance of the marks that’s keepig us all in line, but it’s a nice feeling to find yourself in a functional group with a project your proud to present.

“Hey, you know what? I think, even though we have the biggest group to co-ordinate, our presentation is going to be awesome.”

“Mmm. Definitely.”

*I’ll use initials since I haven’t got permission to disclose anyone’s names nilly willy.