Put it together

I saw about 20 minutes of the Presidential Debates last night, but most of that time was spent furiously trying to finish my report that I handed in this morning. I actually kept fairly good tabs on the debate by keeping The Shape of Days, Instapundit, and the NY Times open in other tabs on my browser (to Firebird, Firefox, and all other tab-enabled browsers, I salute you). But the bulk of my time and mental capacity was spent trying to take the portion of the report that I wrote and the portion of the report that my partner wrote and make them one coherent paper. Let me tell you, it was no small task.

It’s amazing how different the products can be when you give two people the same directions. The paper dealt with historical analysis of several states (which were assigned to us) and we had to identify any trends in the national elections. My partner (who was also assigned to me) then picked two of our four states and I took the other two. I have inherent misgivings about working with other people on assignments—I hate to have my grade depend on someone else—but I thought this project was easy to divide and put together. So last night I sat down to combine the two sections and write an introduction and a conclusion, only to find that my esteemed partner had written the complete opposite of what I had written. He had done no research, he had no sources, his conclusions were completely different from mine, and he left out major trends and influential issues or characters. Perhaps the part that made me cringe the most (and yes, I did cringe) was his style of writing. Phrases like, “Now, if I was a poor man from Montana. . .” peppered his rambling paragraphs that held no structure or main ideas. My left-brain, type-A personality just couldn’t handle it. So I spent three hours doing the extra research on his states and rearranging his paragraphs. In some cases I had to erase several sentences completely. There were a few moments where I had to just get up and walk away from the computer because I got too frustrated. The finished product wasn’t as good as it could have been, but I think it will be sufficient for the expectations of the class.

Perhaps it was because I was checking on the debate the whole time, but the idea occurred to me that putting our two sections together was probably like what would happen if you made George W. Bush and John Kerry work together on a project. Bush’s folksy ramblings would clash with Kerry’s style, and they would probably fight over conclusions too (bilateral, multilateral, etc.). The more I thought about it, the more entertaining the idea became to me. They could do a report together instead of one of the debates, and the American public could watch them get frustrated at each other about a myriad of issues. But then I realized how much I dislike working on projects with people and I decided it would probably be cruel and unusual punishment. This is a free country. We only inflict such torture on students.