I love the Olympics! I hate group work!
I thought the opening ceremony was fabulous! There were some years that the opening didn’t do it for me. The French ceremony wasn’t very appealing (OK, I thought it was weird) and sumo wrestlers aren’t exactly my thing either. But this year’s was incredible!
I’m finally getting to see things I want: gymnastics and diving. I’ve seen swimming as well, including a number of broken records. Beach volleyball got more interesting once it started pouring rain.
Every time I see the girls on the uneven parallel bars, I remember taking gymnastics in high school in gym. It wasn’t pretty. I almost fell over the horse a couple of times as the spotters backed up rather than be spotters. I know we had to write our own routines for the balance beam, floor, and unevens, each having certain elements. I don’t remember if I ever fell off of anything, but I know the floor routine was the only one that wasn’t scary! It’s hard to fall off the floor! 
My on-line program is sort of going OK. One thing we have to do is form learning teams. Well, we’re assigned the people, but we have to accomplish certain tasks. This week’s tasks were simple — fill out this document and choose a coordinator. The coordinator’s job is to turn things in, basically. So, my three team-mates: C posts his share of the form’s information on Friday and says he won’t be on-line over the weekend so whatever we do is fine with him. The form is due today, so in effect he has just refused to be the learning team coordinator and has refused to vote on any version of the document or even vote for anyone else being coordinator. S adds her information Saturday morning and hasn’t been back since. W adds his Saturday night but has ignored my other posts about the revised version as well as coordinator. All threads in the team forum are started by me, trying to accomplish what we’re supposed to do. I send e-mails in addition to the forum posts. Nothing. No one says boo. I post reminders.
Finally, I submit the final version — which I’ve created based on the information provided to me, and I submit myself as the coordinator because otherwise we’ll be late and get marked off. As it is, we’re likely to get marked down because the final version wasn’t voted on at all. In the meantime, you can see what’s happening in the other team forums as well, and I look longingly at the groups that are actually working together and communicating with each other. I hate group work, especially when the two words become mutually exclusive!!
