Meeting New People... Or Not.

I’ve gotten to a certain age where I’m a bit more set in my ways then is probably good for me. This means that whole groups of people are likely to be eliminated as potential friends right off the bat. You’re not very political? You smoke? You’re churchy? You hate cities? You drink cheap, yellow beer? You never went to college and, frankly, don’t see the point? You wear black socks with shorts? You love amusement parks? You would never go camping where there weren’t flush toilets available? Well, then, really, what’s the point? I know the folly of this way of thinking. I know that there are at least a few of you who would answer “yes” to some of these questions, yet we are friends. A couple of us are even close friends. You snuck through, apparently bringing with you enough other fine qualities to balance these black marks on your record or worming your way in before my thinking became so rigid. So, if you turned out to be okay, couldn’t others who presented, at least upon first glance, as not-a-chancers? Sigh. Unless I reform my evil ways, we will never know.

But you people have a role in this, too. As I sat in the bar the other night, chatting with someone who was an agreeable sort, the right (enough) age, and drinking good beer, I found myself writing this person off because of what you, my already-established, dear-to-me (yet somewhat flawed) social circle would think. Oh, not like you would tell me this person was inappropriate (see qualifying factors named above) or evil, but there was a style choice in the personal appearance of this candidate that would not have escaped notice, comment, and probably some mild ridicule. In other words, there are now too many voices in my head (mine and yours) telling me to not even bother. If I never make a new friend again, I’m blaming you, okay?

Social Engineering

As a historian, I am not particularly well-versed in the ways of doing collaborative work. It is not common practice in my field -- for teaching or research -- but I've been dabbling in the world of other disciplines and pedagogies of late and for a few very specific things, group work makes sense.

The project on my mind this afternoon is for a women's and gender studies course. I've done some version of this project twice before and had some great projects and some disasters. In most cases, the disasters came from the composition of the group. So, in a bold and unprecedented move on my part, I am assigning my 24 students to groups with no input from them.

On the one hand, this runs completely counter the values of the social movements and leaders we are studying in this course (on women leaders in 20th century social movements). On the other hand, I think I have the knowledge to build better groups than they do. I know more of the whole group and I have the experience of working with two other classes.

I suppose that I could work to build concensus for me to choose the groups... get the students to buy into this vision... help them to see why this will work for them.... but really? This isn't a social movement where the price of me not building concensus would be my constituents leaving the movement. Nope, this is a class and I'm the prof and I give/assign their grades. Instead of this being a lesson in organizing around a concensus model, this will be a lesson in recognizing power relationships.

So I set to work: boldest students into different groups, but each of those also has someone there who will not let them run away with the show (no two confrontational people together, though, otherwise they'll just argue while the others do the real work); students who've had me in more traditional courses and are better trained up on historical research and citiations are distributed across the groups; most groups get a quiet but studious student (not enough to go around); workhorses go in with "medium" talkers-doers.... I'm going for no one either running away with the group or having to do all the work themselves. I did break up several friend pairs so new social dynamics would have to be built amongst all the members. Damn, this was fun! I can't believe I waited this long to try. These are good, good groups. And yes, you can come back in March and ask me if I still think this!