Decisions = Stress

            Monday October 13, 2010 was a class I will not forget. The only other classes that have put me through that many emotions have been acting classes. Discovering I failed a test and then being thrown into making a decision with forty strangers in thirty minutes was if anything emotional.

It was very interesting what I went through, and what I observed about others. When El Profesor stepped back, and put us to the task of fixing our test grade I felt overwhelmed. For me not having a leader was difficult, but the lack of information was heartbreaking. Those two conflicts stunned me. I sat and waited hoping something would happen even though I was someone who desperately needed my test fixed. Things seemed to change for me, and the class as we gained leaders and gained the knowledge of curve. At that point I felt and saw in others confidence over control over our grade, and it pulled me somewhat out of that avoidance mood. Yet when we gained the curve again I found I was timid. My brain was saying “just take the curve and move on” yet the others pushed harder and I benefited.

In retrospect I wonder if I was avoiding the decision because of guilt. I knew I did not study hard enough, and therefore dissevered my failing grade. The curve is a gift of a grade that I have no business having. I feel this is why I offered only one idea, and even that was for the extra credit assignment to be about ethics.

The decision about the next test formatting was very interesting in other ways. This had the conflicts of communication and goal differences. I feel I fell into the realm of accommodation mainly because the two girls in the center of the room were really competing to win over the “Essay issue”. The two really need the test to be different, and in my mind that made there needs greater than my own. Yet, I also felt my behavior fell into the compromise realm. When the argument over the essay grew stagnate. I stood up and brought up some points on my concept of a fairness in test take. I don’t know if it resolved any issues, but it perhaps eased the tension between the two sides.

Humpty Dumpty

Our Egg broke. With the time constraint and the lack of egg physics knowledge it’s hard to say if our planning was the direct reason that we did not accomplish the goal. Yet in retrospect there are way we could have planned more effectively that may or may not have lead to a better outcome.

If we did not succeed because of poor planning it was because we glanced over step 1. We knew the general direction and time restrictions, but we lacked specificity. If we had been more specific with the direction of our plan then that would have informed our development and perhaps had lead to a better design. Also there was an idea of where we needed to be in correlation with the time but nothing specific that we could turn to.

Again we glanced over Steps 2 and went straight to step 3. Quickly looking at the resources we jumped to designs. I feel our step three went well and was our biggest strength. We discussed every idea going through about four or five designs. We discussed weaknesses and benefits of each one and decide on what was the strongest proposal. Although if he we spent more time looking at the given resources it could have better informed our design. Yet, interestingly enough after we settled on a design we went back to step two to find our strengths and weakness as a group. This planning helped determine group roles in step four.

Our step four was not very specific. After we chose our design it was easy to determine role and sequence of actions, but there were very little alterative discussed. This became a large problem in implementing the plan. Our only alterative or contingency was to just tape it.

Our final step was rather amazing. We ran into problems that were not considered. This showed that we had some flaws in our plan, but we toke some amazing corrective actions and revised the plan as need. First the straws were not cooperating with our design bringing our one contingency into play. We taped it and it worked, but then we discovered builder’s fingers were to big to complete the plan. This is were everyone stepped up and switched roles to accomplish the goal. Personally I was rather impressed by our team for the sudden shift did not affect the out come of the plan. I felt like our team was one of the first teams done within the time limit, our egg carriage looked like what we planned, and we fulfilled all the requirements to not get disqualified.

We could have looked at our direction and our resources more specifically which could have informed on a better design. We could have hashed out the seemly obvious which could have had led to more success. Yet, we communicated well we thought out logically our premises and at crunch time we all contributed which is kind of amazing.  

Yolk

My team’s egg broke. While not all out destroyed it was still cracked and leaking to my team’s despair.  I blame the egg not my team.

My group communicated rather well and our planning session went smoothly. We went through four designs and contrasted there strengths and weakness in a rather calm and enjoyable manner. We laid out which steps to do in a rather specific order. The design we settled on determined most of the roles, but the others positions happened organically with people stepping up as needed. When the builder in construction discovered his fingers were too big someone stepped up to help.

It was fun and I with a second try maybe a better result.