Pair Work – depends on who your partner is?

To begin with, I rather have a pair work assignment than a group assignment. It is true that the more heads you have, the more ideas you will gain. However, in my opinion, the more heads you have, the more work have to be done and the more dissatisfactions will happen. Why? We have been assigned with a group work before and I have already speaks my pleasure and dissatisfactions of the experience. Now I would like to talk about doing the assignments in pairs.

I think it all depends on who you paired up with. It is my luck to have such hardworking and dedicated student as my partner – Sukainah. She always set the standard works to be high (one of which I sometimes lacked as I tend to do things ‘as well as I can’. Sukainah puts the work to ‘acheive more than you can’. So she actually indirectly made me want to be just as good, just as hardworking as she is. The good thing that all this brings is that it created a sort of a competition between us. You can call us the ‘kiasu’ group and I would not be offended. Whenever we see that someone is ahead of us, we would strive even harder, and aims to finish the task faster and better than anyone else. I could not say that we achieve our goals; many of the finished works of the other pairs are just as good as ours. Nevertheless, I am glad to say that we manage to achieve the aim that we had set.

This is exactly why I said that it depends on the partner. I used to have another partner before. However, not only does the person is ‘laid back’ on the works, I can just say it plainly that we are the mirror of the other. She’s the same with me, in my thinking and my way of working. And because of that, there were no competition between us and there’s no desire to be the best.

What I can see from all of my reflection this time is that – how much I am easily affected by others. It is not good, I agree. I should have my own set of grounds, my own standard. I do have another principal that I haven’t been using for quite a long time – ‘be the person who leads, not follow’. Maybe its time I adjust both principals.