Autoethnography, Question 6

Can you describe a moment when you felt the group was “doing something together” that mattered academically?

This may be the strangest answer imaginable, but the one that truly sticks out in my mind was our statistics and probability class. This was a time when I think the whole group took full advantage of the study group. I remember we had a genuinely bad professor. Not that he didn't know statistics and probability, he did. He may hve known too much. The analogy might be he was Michael Jordan trying to coach a high school team. Where MJ might just say, "drive to the basket and make the bucket" a high school team might need a bit more scaffolding than MJ is ready to provide. That was our professors. He was just too smart to be our professor. I believe the entire class felt this way. 

Additionally, I believe it was a summer class and only 6 weeks. We moved FAST. There was no time for straggling or confusion. Then there was the challenge that 3/4 of the study group already knew that they were focused on or leaning toward Qualitative methodologies. I think at the time Anne may have been considering mixed methods. This class might have been her tipping point where she decided to eschew stats and quantitative methods. 

Anyway, we were all worried, and I think we met twice a week during that class. Will was frenzied about doing well in the class. We worked on all of our homework together and really chewed through and reviewed all of the quizzes and practices tests together so we knew what was going on as best we could. More than any other class this was the one that really forced the group to come together and work together like never before. 

For me, who already knew he wanted to have a quantitative methodology, I loved this moment. In my case , it wasn't just about getting through the class, but I wanted to understand it so I could use it in my dissertation. So, it was fun for me to find other resources, to discuss it with the class, to work together to learn as fully as possible a topic that for us was completely arcane and not at all natural to us. 

This was definitely a moment for me. I analogize it to a group of drowning victims who suddenly hit a storm, and we all had to hold onto the life ring and kick together to make it through the waves without going down for good.