I’ve always needed something to do. On summer vacations from grade school, I organized projects with my friend Anne. One summer we ran a crafts camp for little kids in our basement. I couldn’t believe how slowly two hours could pass when you were trying to keep three or four kids from eating clay or sticking their fingers together with glue.
The following summer we did the crafts ourselves. We made potholders and plaster-of-Paris statues, painting them in bright colors to sell door-to-door to the neighbors.
The next year I organized a club and we collected dues from everyone. The club was supposed to make crafts to sell, also. The dues were to buy craft supplies, and at the end of the summer we’d have a profit. But as the days wore on, less and less seemed to be accomplished at each meeting. There was no profit.
That’s when I learned I could not work with a group. One partner might be OK, but no more.
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When I was a grad student at SDSU learning how to teach composition, group work was in. Collaboration and audience response were the building blocks that would lead to students’ success not only in communicating their ideas, but also in formulating them.
The arguments for group work were compelling and the professor who taught us was a true believer. In her classroom, group collaboration was productive.
But when I tried to use groups in my own classroom, the method failed miserably. I was not a true believer.
I was an individualist. Whenever I was forced to work with a group of fellow students—and this had been true for me since grade school—I either did all the work myself or organized it into pieces that we could each do separately.
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One problem with group collaboration is that people want to talk about every thing ad nauseam before they ever get around to doing something.
But I need things to do. I cannot handle that interim period where you hold all the possibilities up in the air like balloons, waiting to see which one survives the thinner atmosphere.
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I joined a co-op art gallery once, eager to enjoy the camaraderie of fellow artists and to work together to exhibit and sell our art. Two other artists joined at the same time I did.
Twelve years later, they are still members.
The gallery has changed a lot over those years. It has been painted and spruced up, new floors put in, improved systems installed, and programs instituted that make it function better for the artists and the surrounding community.
But I didn’t last a year there. All it took was one too many meetings at which no decisions were made, unless you count the decisions not to do anything until we studied a situation further.
When I joined, I had lots of ideas about how the gallery could be improved. So did the other new members. But they had more patience than I did.
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Whenever Adrian and I tried to do a project together, we had the same problem. He wanted to study the situation and review all options. I wanted to just start doing it.
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I guess that’s one advantage of being self-employed and living alone. These days whenever I need to do something, I just do it.
