Collaborative Waffles
7 months of MPC at UFM! aaand people are still late.
We began this morning with the idea of having an awesome waffle breakfast as a way to celebrate our first month in this second semester and our seventh month in the program. Everyone offered to bring in some ingredient or tool in order to make this happen, turns out that at 7:00am only 9 of us were present (Only Alejo announced that he was coming in late, which allowed us to make arrangements to bring in what he had assigned). By 7:15 we had 4 more people (Javier T, Kata, Carmen and Lore) however we were still missing Grace.
A discussion started on whether we should’ve gone ahead and make the waffles or postpone the activity in order to have everyone present. I said that if we keep postponing activities we’ll never get anything done, it was even a way of punishing those who were missing for not being responsible. However Marce made a comment which made me take a different take on it.
She said that the MPC was like making this waffle recipe. If we were missing an ingredient we wouldn’t be able to create the mix. I got to understand this concept of collaborative learning in a better way, I can bring in the flour but it’ll be useless without the rest of the ingredients. It reminds me a lot of how we have this level of collective thinking in a dialogue (compared to the limits there are to one person thinking alone). I was still angry but I learned the lesson and the importance of honest group work.
After drawing class I took some of the chocolate chips I brought and shared them with the group. When Grace asked for some I told her that she would learn about "Carrots and Sticks" (way of analyzing incentives) by not having one due to her tardiness. She didn't take the joke quite well and aggressively responded that it didn't matter because other people were late too, that if she was the only person missing we would've gone ahead anyways. As I already wrote, she was in fact the only person missing at the point that we could've made the waffles. Today I'm planning on giving her feedback about her role in the MPC and how she needs to realize that she's an active participant of the program and not some invisible audience member that can slip by unnoticed.
Later on that day we had our discussion on Don Quijote and I realized that only Grace and I participated and tried to get the conversation going. Amable’s dialogues always run smoothly, which wasn’t the case this time, everyone seemed absolutely lost. Later on I was told that everyone decided to remain in the circle after discussing that they hadn’t done the reading in consideration to Amable. However he clearly noticed, I noticed, and the discussion was poor. The dialogue was missing most of it’s ingredients. Every person’s input matters. We (yes, I’m clearly including myself) need to get it together and be up to date because we’re losing amazing opportunities of learning.