The Intuitives(45)

At this, Mackenzie rolled her eyes.

“Wow, OK,” Christina said, grinning wryly. “I see I’m going to have my work cut out for me. Samantha first, and then Mackenzie. Let’s talk to each other. Samantha, why do you think teams are stupid?”

“Because they are,” she answered. “One person is always the best at whatever you have to do, so either that person just ends up doing all of it, which makes having a team useless, or they don’t do all of it, and then the other people bring your grade down.”

“I take it that has been your experience of teamwork in school projects?”

“Uh… yeah,” Sam said, raising her eyebrows for emphasis.

“OK, Sam, I hear you, and I understand why you feel that way. Mackenzie, I take it from your own reaction that you have a different perspective on teamwork. Can you tell us about your own experience?”

“Teammates watch each other’s backs,” Mackenzie said immediately. “You can’t be everywhere at once. Teams let you get things done in different places at the same time. Even if you don’t all have the same skill level, everyone can do something. The whole point of a team is that you don’t have to do everything yourself.”

“Sure, if you don’t mind it being done badly,” Sam shot back.

“Mackenzie,” Christina said, quickly heading off any reply, “can you give us, perhaps, a specific example of a team that you have found helpful?”

“My family,” Mackenzie replied easily. “My dad’s always back and forth on deployments, so we have to get things done at home without him. We share chores like cooking and cleaning and stuff, so that it all gets done. My youngest sister is only nine, but she can set the table, wipe down the counters, things like that. Everyone helps according to what they can do, so nobody has to do everything.”

“It sounds to me like those are two very different kinds of teams, with two very different experiences,” Christina said when Mackenzie had finished. “I think one important take-away here is that even a simple word like ‘team’ can mean different things to different people.”

Christina wrote ‘school team projects’ and ‘family team chores’ on the left side of the whiteboard.

“What other examples of teams can you think of?” She asked, addressing the question to everyone.

“Video games!” Sketch exclaimed.

“OK, tell me about video games,” Christina said, smiling. “What’s a video game team like?”

“Like, if there’s two doors in a room, Rush can watch one door, and I can watch the other one. Then nobody can surprise us.”

“That’s definitely an example of teamwork,” Christina agreed, and she added ‘video game teams’ to the list on the board. “Rush? Do you have anything to add to that, as our resident gaming expert?”

“It’s like Sketch said,” Rush responded. “You get each other’s backs. But I think it’s different from the other two things.”

“OK, good! How is it different?” Christina asked.

“Well, it’s like Mackenzie said, where you need your team because you can’t be everywhere at once, but at the same time it’s really like Sam said too, because if some people can’t pull their weight, the team’s gonna lose.” He looked over at Sam, leaning forward a bit to catch her eye across Sketch and Mackenzie, acknowledging her contribution.

He’s talking about me, Sam thought angrily. He thinks I’m not good enough to be here.

“Daniel?” Christina asked. “How about you? Do you have a different team example? It’s OK if you don’t have anything to add right now. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I just want to get as many different perspectives as we can.”

“A band,” Daniel said quietly. “Or a symphony, for that matter. Or a choir.”

“A band,” Christina said, obviously pleased. “Yes! That’s an excellent example. Tell me about teamwork in a band.”

“Well, like Rush and Sam both said, everyone has to do their part, but every part definitely adds something important. Nobody can play a whole symphony by themselves. You need everyone, playing separately but together, at the same time, and then when you listen to it, even though you can hear all the individual pieces, together it’s still so much bigger than that, somehow, like a kind of magic…”

Daniel fell silent, a little embarrassed, but Christina smiled at him. On the left side of the board, she wrote ‘band/symphony/choir,’ and on the empty right side, she wrote, in all capital letters: ‘BIGGER - LIKE MAGIC.’

? ? ?

Back in the workshop, Kaitlyn and Ammu sat next to each other at the table in the center bay, a stack of oversized papers sitting off to one side.

Ammu had begun the morning by asking Kaitlyn to fix a simple table fan. In just a few short minutes, she had taken apart the entire mechanism, twisting and turning the pieces this way and that until she had located the problem: a thin wire that had broken away from the motor assembly. She had fixed the connection in no time, reassembling the device and presenting it to Ammu proudly.

Although he had provided her with several technical drawings of the fan’s inner workings, Kaitlyn had not consulted any of them. Now, Ammu placed one of those drawings on the table in front of them, where they could look at it together.