They Didn't Want To Pick?

Not all classes are the same. Of course, I knew this going into today, but some days highlight that important truth more than others.

You see, I allowed my American Literature classes to select their partners for their first project of the year. I don't typically do partner or group projects, but this particular project lends itself to collaboration and it shortens the number of presentations that we have to do. I had my students email me their partners to alleviate some stress and make it more of a first come, first served situation. This particular method of partner selection worked beautifully in two of my three classes. It failed in the last of my classes. I'm not sure why. Maybe there aren't that many friends in the class. Maybe they really don't know each other. Maybe they don't like each other. I'm just getting to know these students, so I can't truly analyze the reason for their failure to partner up.

So instead of depending on the simple method of partnering that I did with the other two classes I had to put together pairs of student who I am still getting to know. It takes me about two weeks to be able to easily put a face with a name (an advantage that elementary teachers have over high school is not having to learn the names of over 100 students), so suddenly partnering them took some quick thinking and praying that none of them were angry about who they ended up with.

I'm not sure what the lesson learned is. Maybe that there is no perfect partnering system. Whether I do it or they do it there will always be problems. Next time, I need a contingency plan. I guess you can never be too prepared.