Together We Can Do Anything...But Alone I Can Do It Better

         One of the possibly worst inevitabilities of high school life is the feat of working with your comrades to complete a project for a grade of which all members of the group share. If a teacher gives out a new project to do, and says that groups are optional, I do all in my power to do the project by myself. It always just works out better that way. I prefer to depend on myself than to depend on others to maintain my grade point average. The worst possible situation however is when a teacher puts you into groups that are "randomly selected". I swear, that random group generator is out to get me.
         I'm one of those people that if no one else takes charge within a group, I'll step up and make sure that everything gets done. Unfortunately, if I'm in a group with inefficient members, I get impatient. That's one of my worst faults...I'm impatient. Especially when it comes to school work. I was a slacker all through middle school. But then when classes actually got hard, I stepped it up, and now I can't help but want to get my school work done as soon as I possibly can. Putting it off just means that I'll be frantically doing it at the last minute.
        So now as I sit on Sunday night, waiting for two out of four group members to send me their parts of the project, you can imagine that I'm getting a little antsy about the project that has to be in the hands of my teacher tomorrow morning. It's natural for most students to put off their school work all weekend until Sunday night. But seeing as I was the one who volunteered to take everyone's pieces of the project and put them together into the final product, I'm eagerly awaiting their pieces of the project, seeing as without just one of these pieces, the project is far from complete.
        Teachers throughout my middle and high school career would always lecture about how imperative it was to learn how to work well in a group. Because the further you get in school, the more group projects you'll be stuck with. I've never understood why teachers force us together with a group of other students to finish a task. Do they realize that every group has the exact same people? There's the one who goes with the flow. They won't  take charge, but they'll do what they're asked. There's the slacker who depends completely on the rest of the group. They will usually lead the conversation on the day it's due with "that was due today?" And then there's the person like me who cares most about their grade, so they take charge of the group and picks up the slack if need be.
       I'm not trying to say that my work is better than anyone else's, not at all. I just get nervous when one group member has the capability to ruin the the grade of the entire group. Make work a little harder for the slackers of the world, don't force group projects upon your students.