Waxing Cranky

Sometimes there's no explanation for why a lesson or activity falls apart for a group or individual. Maybe the moon or the planets were in an unfavorable position this morning for one particular group of four boys, who are usually pretty good friends.

The class was working on a collaborative assignment analyzing a model narrative, of the type they are writing, written by a former student. In front of the four boys was a large sheet of paper with a grid of 16 elements to look for in the story, and each student was supposed to fill out four boxes, in consultation with the other members of their group. 

It was an assignment that had been and would be successfully completed by 29 other groups of students over the course of the day, and based on their collective aptitude and achievement, they should have been a dream team, but they found themselves lagging way behind everyone else, because these four guys just could not get their act together. 

In between insulting each other only half playfully, they bickered about which chair at the table they wanted to sit in, whose handwriting was better, which detail they should include, and whose turn it was to write. "What is going on here?" I asked, and four fingers each pointed at a different member of the group.

"Can I get some water?" one guy requested. "I need to get away from them! This group is really stressing me out!"