Reflection on Group Work: Fortunate Travelers!

At the beginning of our Journey in Literature class, we were assigned to work in a group. At first, I was hoping the professor let us chose the people we wanted to work with because I knew two people before we took this class, but the professor selected the groups we would have to work during the whole semester. The first day we had to work in the group we were really a bunch of strangers. We didn't know each other. That first approach was very formal. We told each other our names, we share our phone numbers and emails, and we also create a group message in Whatsapp to establish contact more easily. During this class, we also divide our roles in the group and selected a group name: Fortunate Travelers. Valeria and Liane were the note takers, Héctor and Antonio worked as the researchers, Manuel was the conflict solver and I act as the task manager of the group.

Meeting new people can be an interesting and enriching experience or an awful one. Since we did not know each other, I think we were very timid those first days of class. As time progressed, we started talking to each other more than the beginning of the course and we felt more comfortable sharing our thoughts and discussing our opinions. We are very different, but agree with a group opinion was never a big trouble for us. The first group project we had to present in front of class was about Jamaica Kincaid's novel "A Small Place". We search for information about the author, we looked out for quotes that supported our point of view, and  we wrote about the different themes on the reading. Finally, we made our oral presentation and we felt comfortable with it. Unfortunately, we did not felt very happy with the grade we received  from its analysis and I believe this experience helped us to join more as a group and worked more than we were already working to obtain a good grade in the next group project.

This is the poster we made for the oral
 presentation about Carl Jung's travel to North Africa.

The final oral presentation about Carl Jung is the highlight of our group work. We had the same purpose: obtain a better grade. We took it very seriously and we search for information about the author and quotes that support our argument. We decided to meet up during the weekend to make sure we do a great presentation. During the meeting, we finished our analysis on the different themes such as othering, in-group, out-group, location, identity, and perspective, and we also had the opportunity to prepare a poster to explain better the location theme. This experience helped us to grow as a group and know more about each other. We shared our opinions and we respected each other.

It has been an honor to work with you, guys! We all worked hard and I'm thankful with all of you. I had told meeting new people can be an interesting and enriching experience or an awful one. Well, the last thing I had to say is that meeting Valeria, Liane, Hector, Antonio and Manuel was an interesting and enriching experience! I had learned that group work are not always bad. We can gain a lot of knowledge from many of them.

Benefits of group work

"Teaching" and "Helping" by Jim Cooper

It was assigned to read two chapters from the book Down on the Island by Jim Cooper. In the first one, "Teaching", Cooper expresses his point of view about the syllabus for the English class he was teaching at the Colegio located in Mayagüez. He noticed how much difficult was for the students to learn English because most of them didn't know it very well and therefore they didn't understand the readings they had to do at first. After he visited some public schools, he also noticed some of the teachers were having trouble to speak English. Cooper proposed a syllabus which included strictly language courses to the freshman and short stories and novels to the sophomore students. He would loved to stated that the language program he set up solved the student's language problems, but it didn't at all.

In the second chapter, "Helping", Cooper expresses his point of view about a method implemented by the students from our island. This method consisted of 'helping throughout cheating'. How this can be possible? Puerto Ricans, as Jim Cooper demonstrated, are the most hospitable people in the world and they tend to do whatever they can in order to help others. Many of the students seek for an extra help in their classmates, but this attitude was not only in their everyday work but during the time they were taking exams too. However, students learn how they must behave in the school since they are kids at the primary levels. All I want to say with this statement is that students have been taught since their primary levels to be cooperative with each other.

"When I started asking students why they were looking at another student's paper during an exam, they replied with no embarrassment: because I don't know the answer, and maybe he does. If I asked the other student why he let him look at his paper, I got some such answer as: but I'm just trying to help him. He's my friend."

We all know that this kind of help is actually cheating, but the students didn't realize it. It is also worrying that Cooper stated teachers also promote the cheating attitude. I think we must do everything possible to earn our grade by our own effort; not at the expense of others. Students should help them, but in a good way working on cooperative teaching or learning, but they should not cheat. I'm against it.