Today CSR 309 was a little confusing. The president of the class, Joe, asked all the group leaders to come to the front and they all had a discussion amongst themselves for about 10 minutes. After a few minutes I noticed my group leader was not down there. Oh, how convenient, one of the few class times we actually meet in groups, my leader misses class. I was sitting next to Michelle, who's in my group, and I debated for a while if one of us should go down there to get the information that most likely is pretty important. Finally the group of leaders split up and gathered there groups, which left me even more confused as what to do.

That's where the first problem arose. My group has met, maybe twice. We met during tower building and then a meeting before group memo 1 was due. I only know one other member of my group because I had another class with him. We are now a little halfway through this sememster and I do not know the other members of my group, let alone my leader.

We finally all got together and started the assignment. This was actually a good activity. My group got to know each other, and shared ideas of how to make our group better. I guess it was sort of a good thing that Ross was not there. We did not bash him or anything, but we were free to share ideas and things that we thought he could do better, without fearing hurting his feelings to his face.

We came to the concussion that everyone in the group are great communicators, and feel we can communicate freely, but the structure to communicate within the group is not there. Everyone knows they can e-mail Ross with whatever they want, but no one feels we can e-mail others in our group. I think this is because we have never taken the time to get to know each other. Some of this blame was placed on Ross for not getting us all together.

I think this class time has made a great impact on my group. Although our leader did not take the initiative to gather the group, the group members put our ideas together to make us a better group. This will allow us to not only communicate better, but we will undoubtfully get better grades on papers because we now feel able to ask each other questions.

So my leadership lesson this class is simple. Even though my leader was not doing a good job as a leader, the members of the group were able to still get things done and turn around our group.