Review of Group Presentation

My group is the Elephant Man group and we'll be presenting tomorrow, the last class meeting. My group members are Cathy, Dylan, and Larry.

I am so fortunate to have these people in my group. They are all very kind, generous, smart, and gifted. We all got along so well, and everyone was so open to what the other had to say, whether it was viable information or not.

We got together four times, three times at school and once at Cathy's house. At school, we discussed the logistics of our presentation and at Cathy's, we sealed the deal.

At first, we agreed on having a gimmick like past presentations. But we soon settled on just focusing on the texts and getting serious about the work and theory rather than deviating from the essence.

We had a collection of movies to sort through to parallel with The Elephant Man. We were even thinking of showing a snippet of The Twilight Zone's episode, "Eye of the Beholder," which is the one where the woman wakes from surgery and screams because she does not look like the pig-faced people.

The idea behind this was to beg the question, "What is the standard of beauty? And who is the 'other'?" but we agreed that we were veering off course with that clip.

We finally settled on showing the parallels between Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange and David Lynch's The Elephant Man. We will be juxtaposing three scenes of Clockwork Orange with three scenes of The Elephant Man. After showing each pair of contrasting scenes, we will ask the class to write their visceral responses, and will in turn discuss the material.

We are crossing our fingers that all goes well. But what counts the most is that all four of us really had a blast together. The camaraderie was amazing. We were always in agreement and willing to try new approaches. And in enjoying our time together, we learned quite a bit. So, to be strictly honest, this presentation has been a wonderful experience, probably one of the highlights for me of this entire class. And I can only hope for such harmony in future group presentations.