group work anger!

right, so i have been quite absent from here of late and it is to some probably not surprising that the issue that brings me back is one that has sparked an angry fire-breathing dragon within me. university group work! now, i have in the past 3 years somehow managed to avoid this situation i now find myself in. mostly, my experience has been very positive largely due to the wonderous brain that lives in alex's head. now though, my faith in the intelligence of humanity has been shaken to its core and where else, but in the graduating class of the university of wollongong's communications and media studies class. as a result, i have come to the conclusion that this exercise is not in an effort to prepare students for communal projects in the work place but rather, a communist plot to weed out the people in a group (like me) that will just go, 'awh frak it, i'll do it myself!'.

my group, made up almost entirely of not just stupid but lazy students has gone from mildly irritating me to full blown psychotic rage. as someone once said, "a fail mark doesn't mean your stupid. a pass mark means your stupid. a fail means you are stupid AND lazy!". i don't mean to diminish the work one member of the group has contributed but for fraks sake, i built a freaking website for these people and haven't received so much as a, 'huh cool' from them.

the final straw to this absurd debacle came today, when one girl announced to the group (via email mind you) that she wouldn't even be attending the tutorial for the submission of the assignment. ok so yes, this is the student that asked a tutorial full of second year politics students, what democracy was. then to add further insult to her obviously injured brain, if iran and afghanistan were, "essentially, like the same country". age isn't an excuse for everything.

so, what to do? submit the assignment, that i have done a vast majority of, and hope for a decent mark? the problem is i am so far beyond caring about the media studies degree. not that i don't think it is both fascinating and important but, come on i don't want a job within its correlated industry, my group members do, why the hell should i bother.

but, i have bothered and now i will tell you why. there aren't many opportunities outside of internet comment bashing, when one has the compulsion, nay duty, to smack down someone they hate with every fibre of their being. in a way that caitlin has termed, 'oxbridge style'. essentially, this means veiling rather horrible insults with a vocabulary that one would find within the halls of academic excellence, oxford. think stephen fry insulting catholics and/or david mitchell attacking with angry logic the idea of fastidious male grooming. yes, they both went to cambridge.... but, you must concede my point.

oh my point, right. for this assignment there is a pretty exciting up-side. the opportunity to bitch about my group 'colleagues' in a manner that, i think, will not only tickle my tutor with its unreserved anger/ honestly but also make me feel a lot better about this entirely unsatisfying experience.

as such, i have decided to begin my 1000 word academic rant with, "during the past few weeks i have discovered that, copernicus was wrong about the earth being the centre of the universe; as clearly each member of my group believes that this right is reserved solely for each of them. were it not for my ability to discern this fact early on, in the creation of this assignment, i feel that all we would have to show today is a quote from 'jersey shore' regarding the state of politics in the world. this is not to say that my group members believe solely what they are told about the wider world simply from one reality television 'star' they are big believers in getting a wider perspective. kim kardashians blogpost on barak obama was considered and aptly rejected. laziness was also an issue. now, im not saying my group didn't contribute. however, a link to julia gillard's twitter account in my mind should not be considered indept research. simply put, my groups lazy approach to this assignment made me look like roadrunner, compared to their not only slow but, wildly incompetent wile e coyote."

what do we think? too harsh?