Larcenous Designs

Group work has its place... My current field is extremely fond of it, and it's fortunate that in grad school the only real difficulty with it is scheduling (but then, I'm in a field that's generally known for being cooperative and helpful). That being said, my most valuable experiences of group learning have been in settings other than producing a standard sort of class project. The first experience was study groups in high school and college-- in a subject with really challenging material (accellerated chemistry/physics in high school, and linguistics in college), it's helpful to have more than one brain working on problems and making sense of the material-- people help each other. The other experience was a class project with a practical application-- we built a small computer lab for a nonprofit. A single person can't easily do that, certainly not in the amount of time we had. Plus again, more people for troubleshooting= better. But the standard group projects people do earlier in schooling do lay the foundations for this kind of teamwork. These are my current thoughts as a student, anyway.