Throw and Catch

I shirk reflecting about group work because I don’t want to be negative. Or because what bothers me about working with other people might be due to a personal trait of my own and not due to my partners’ being poor coworkers, therefore they do not deserve negative feedback. The problem that I always have when working with other people is communication. I often think that I state things very clearly and precisely and in response I get vague replies that seem to indicate either that my arrow completely missed the target or that it flew right by them and they didn’t even notice it, they just felt a breeze blow by that incited their response.
I like D.G. and was excited to work with her. But, although we did the transformations project together, I don’t feel like I really worked with her. I felt like I worked alongside her, and she me. But we didn’t really put things together, we just put things on top of each other; sifted rather than mixed. I got the impression that she has a really busy life and that spending much time out of class on the project would not work out well.
However, I think we did manage to put together a decent paper. The research paper that I did last term concerned a subject I had already spent a lot of time thinking about outside of school: the art of music engineering. I was eager to do research this term on a subject that I have spent very little time thinking about: trade. My main insight came from reading a book about historic economies based on exchanging presents. This led me to thinking about how trade is just as much about exchanging wares as it is about exchanging ways of thinking.

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