pretty quiet week so far. incidentally, next week is election week in most of the US, so don’t forget to vote on November 7th (and vote early if you can–my ballot just has to be dropped off)
pretty quiet week so far. incidentally, next week is election week in most of the US, so don’t forget to vote on November 7th (and vote early if you can–my ballot just has to be dropped off)
As you are limited in your ability to appeal to higher ups, I’d gear up to axing him.
Be careful to document EVERYTHING, and ideally to give him some research task or other discrete element out of the main project & which you can attribute solely to him. If he bangs it out of the park you’ll have to just be glad he has strengths after all.
These assignments are supposed to train students how to work with those we do not get along with, but sometimes that necessitates not letting an obstructive individual have the opportunities to be obstructive.
I have already been documenting everything, since that is part of the assignment. We get graded individually based on contributions, so we have to keep records of who did what. So at least he can’t fuck up my grades.
We also have to do individual research. He won’t do it because he thinks it’s pointless. This is definitely contributing to his lack of competence, as he’s not learning techniques that he should be. This is a very practical skills based degree, so learning skills by looking at what professionals have done is a big part of it, and he literally won’t do it because “you don’t learn to drive by looking at the history of the car” (he can’t drive either). It makes it challenging to assign him something at the edge of the project. The thing I assigned him to last week was intended to be that - it needs to be done, but it’s a part that will work well whether it looks great or crap. And this was the thing he refused to do.
So he’s probably on the way to being axed of his own accord. It’s just terribly frustrating in the meantime. I’ve always thought I could work with anybody, even those I don’t get along with. I can find common ground to get along with almost everybody. Turns out having a couple of shared interests with this guy isn’t enough. He thinks he’s the main character and everybody else are just NPCs.