Feeling better this week, and feeling validated.

In the ongoing saga of the university team project, when our main teacher returned on Monday morning, he took one look at an element of the project which had been hurried thrown together by the very arrogant group member despite my best efforts to assign him to something within his capabilities. The teacher looked at what he’d done, deemed it completely unusable, and pointed to a smaller part of the project I had done and said “this bit’s good, do it like that”. Because it’s a major, important piece of the project that has to be done from scratch, this is actually a full 3-4 days work for me, to be ready by next Monday. So I’m probably not getting much else done this week. But because I know what I’m doing (no arrogance there, I’m just applying skills I have over a decade worth of experience with to a slightly different use-case), it is going to look epic when it’s done.

And because our main teacher was back, and able to teach his other classes (a course for a younger cohort on the same campus), our secondary teacher wasn’t having to cover him, so we also got some attention from him this week too. This meant I could have a chat with him at the end of the day and express the impact doing 70% of the project by myself has had on my mental health - he went and looked over the project and asked if he could guess which parts I had done. After he had done this (one incorrect guess out of more than a dozen items), he said “I agree, you’ve done 70% of the project by yourself, that’s not sustainable, I’ll help you get the rest of them working.” The next morning he tried all the same techniques I had tried, and it was no more effective when he did than when I had. We still got to the end of the day with most of the team having not done the things they’d been told to do.

It took the guy who did a half-arsed job on the important part of the project a full 24 hours to notice that his contribution had been scrapped and I had started it over from scratch. I learned my lesson from the last time he did this 6 weeks ago - I tried to salvage it, and the result was worse and took longer than if I’d started over, so this time I didn’t even try to make his work usable. The dude is not happy that the main teacher has “shit on everything he’s done”. At least he’s not blaming me. Yet. He hasn’t been updating the digital whiteboard with the list of things he’s done for the project, and he can’t remember anything he’s done. I’ve been documenting everything in my own log. I could have checked what he’d done and told him what to put on the whiteboard. I chose not to.

So yay for receiving validation that I am not the problem here. Yay for the teachers recognising that I’m doing the majority of the work, and I’m the only one doing quality work. Yay for the teachers being aware that my mental health is suffering and I need more support. But I’m still doing 70% of the work. Between the team’s inaction and the teachers being absent, we’re several weeks behind schedule, but the deadline is still the deadline. I’m not convinced a completed project is even achievable anymore.