As Seen on the Daily Show

Okay, well, not my blog in particular, but the phenomena of blogging and its "threat" to credible media sources.

I would write more about that, but I feel an over-powering urge to whine about the over-abundance of group discussions that I've been forced to endure over the past week or so. Out of the past 8 days of class, 5 of those days have included some form of assigned/graded group discussion. This tends to get quite overwhelming, not simply because it forces me to actually finish my assigned readings, but because of the general ineffectiveness of the whole group scenario.

There's a wise saying along the lines of, "If you want to ensure nothing gets done, and extinguish creative thought, just form a committee."

Scheduled group discussion falls under this same idea. When my fellow peers actually do decide to mention anything aloud, very rarely is it insightful or worthy of further debate. In part, this is due to the structure of our discussions, whereby the class is divided into groups and asked to apply the assigned readings to the same teacher-fabricated question.

After the first group makes their presentation, virtually every other group follows them up by saying, "Um, well, most of what we discussed has already been covered, but, uh, oh!...the covers of our texts sure are shiny, aren't they!?"

An hour of discussion time eventually degrades into 5 minutes of interaction, and 55 painful minutes of the professor throwing out rhetorical questions to fill time. Bah! Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another group discussion to prepare hand-in notes for.

Currently: Anticipating heading out to Hinton to work on a *new* Tri-City telescopic double over Reading Week.