Small Group Discussion

When I signed up for the story I decided on “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.  At the time I did not know I had read the story before in my English 101 class.  I remembered most of the story but I could not remember how it ended.  I knew someone died but I could not remember if the whole family was killed and how.  When I read it the first time I felt like I was consistently trying to remember what happened next instead of actually reading the story for what it was saying.  I reread the story but this time paying attention to the little things and pondering more because I had questions to follow that were predetermined instead of just showing up to class and talking while having it lead from one thing to the other.  I felt as if we have been preparing for this discussion all class long by learning how to analysis stories and having class discussion with small groups and as a class.  So I have been learning and preparing since the beginning of class.  I also learned how to have a back up with the conversation.  I knew we had to talk so I wanted to make sure I could say things and understand what others were saying so I could add to the discussion.  When we are doing a big class discussion I do not talk much.  When we get into smaller groups I talk but we do not have to do it for an extensive amount of time.

When reading stories or poems from class I would look up a little bit of things but when doing this I dug a little deeper and brought my notes and pages to class so I could either look them up to quote or to help with my though process during the discussion.  I would not do that for a class discussion.

Honestly I felt this discussion I was more prepared for class because I had to be able to answer most if not all the questions because I knew I would have to talk but you never know where the conversation is going to go and what we are going to talk about.  I enjoyed how it was student lead and it allowed us to be able to agree with our classmates or disagree.  We had our own opinions and we had facts.  While having the discussion I heard answers that were very thorough and I learned from them.  This story had so many different things we could have looked up to answer the question so I felt I did more research on this one than all the others except for the analysis paper. 

When we started class Scott mentioned the small group discussion.  Not much was said about what it was and what we were going to do with it until the time came closer and closer.  I believe we have been preparing for this small group discussion since class started but did not know it until the time came and we were unleashed to run the discussion.  I enjoyed it.  In the beginning I was nervous because I felt the pressure of making sure I got my responses in and complete before the time ran out.  I had more that I wanted to say and add tot the conversation but I had used up all my responses.  Scott said there were some of us, myself being one of them that should let others respond.  I understand there needs to be a way to grade the discussion but I wanted to keep going.  There were moments were I felt instead of a conversation we were competing with one another to be the first to comment because that is the one we wanted to comment on the topic.  When I first heard 45 minutes I was wide eyed because I thought that was a long time, but when our time came I wanted to keep going but we had to move on.  Kind of wish we had more time.