Is it normal to hate my learning disabled lab partner?

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16 Comments

I am in college taking electrical engineering, which involves labs twice a week. My lab partner who we will call "dave" has learning and cognitive disabilities which he gets accommodations for. I have nothing against people with learning disabilities/cognitive issues but working with Dave every week makes me want to rip my hair out.

Dave always comes to the lab unprepared, and copies my answers to the pre-lab report. As soon as I start building the circuits Dave always rips them apart claiming I'm building them wrong, then proceeds to wire them very incorrectly,creating a short. He cant do even basic tasks and calculations(ie: he cant convert 5000ohm to kilo-ohms). He has no basic logic and every 2 seconds he calls the prof over saying " teacher she's doing it wrong" and then when the prof comes she says I did everything correctly. This always leads to us arguing over how to do it and since he screws everything up I end up doing the whole thing ( and we always get 10/10). Every time I assign even a tiny task to him he messes it up. For example, our circuit was hooked up to the power supply and I asked him to turn on his meter to measure the voltage. Instead of doing what I asked, he touched the hot resistors in the circuit with his fingers and got burned. I promptly shut off everything (cut power) and he said it was my fault he got burned. Later that day he tried to argue with me during the computer science lab saying that he was a year older than me even though we are 4 months apart( him feb 5 199X, me june 6 of that same year). I explained that we are 4 months apart but he said "NO IM A WHOLE YEAR OLDER, YOU DONT KNOW HOW TO COUNT". What an idiot...

In other words, I'm sick of having this moron for a lab partner who copies all my answers and acts like he's superior to me. I know he has moderate learning disabilities but he is so condescending and down right stupid that I was happy when he got burned. Is it wrong that I have no respect for him want him to fail out of this program? IS it wrong to think that people with such low intelligence/cognitive ability shouldn't be in a program like this? I feel so guilty for thinking this way.

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88% Normal
Based on 85 votes (75 yes)
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Comments ( 16 )
  • Darkoil
    11 years ago

    Next time he argues with you punch him in the throat and shut the stupid bastard up.

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  • noid
    11 years ago

    Your right why is he in program? In the past not everyone got into college that easily.

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  • NotStrangeBird
    11 years ago

    Teach him the electrical principles of the taser.

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  • dom180
    11 years ago

    Obnoxiousness is a trait common to people regardless of their mental condition. Normal.

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  • anti-hero
    11 years ago

    Yeah, sounds like a pain in the ass to me.

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  • blunder13
    10 years ago

    My names "dave"

    :o (

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  • Stifler
    11 years ago

    Reminds me of my science partner. His name is knavada osborn.(navi for short)
    So navi always thinks he is soooo cool. The kid always threw our science projects at the other students. this kid couldnt even turn a light switch on or off without hurting somebody. One time I was hot wiring an electrical toy...he took some scissors and cut the wires electricuting us both. Thank god I was only paralized for a few hours. But he was perminantly paralized in his arm and part of his shoulder for it. But once I was redoing the project...Guess what he did...Glued a battery to a small generator and poked it with a wire. BLAMMO! battery acid every where. Guess what? he got an S (ita highest grade possible rarely gained) grade on the project and I got a D-...

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  • Sog
    11 years ago

    I had a very similar experience to this one when I was in college. One of my lab partners lacked very basic writing skills so I could never count on him to answer any of the questions or work on parts of the writeup.

    In the beginning we tried to share the workload by splitting the report up into sections, but I ended up just having to re-write all his parts anyway, and by the end of the semester I just did everything on my own.

    It was bad. REALLY REALLY bad. Like I have no idea how he passed high school when literally every other word was misspelled and most of it was incomprehensible.

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  • bambie
    11 years ago

    I have personal experience with learning disabilities because I have one mine is in reading writing spelling and communication so i was in all the classes with all the different disabilities what I found was that a lot of the people in my classes were ignorant because they found they could use their disabilities as an excuse and crutch and others let them because they had the disability my best advice is to talk to the teacher ur partner and you can have a conversation in private u don't want to keep getting into big arguments in front of people having an audience fuels the behavior no one wants to look bad in front of others talk to him tell him ur thoughts get ur feelings out in the open if that doesn't help I suggest u just separate from ur partner ur better off on ur own and who wants to work with someone who is always messing stuff up you don't want to put something together that really hurts ur partner because he doesn't get that it will hurt him

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    • 5796
      11 years ago

      Thanks for your insight Bambie! Luckily, my lab partner has stopped showing up to class (and labs too), which means that I get to work alone :) You also made a good point that discussing it in private is better than having an audience (will keep that in mind if I ever get another really terrible lab partner lol)

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  • FriendlyAnswers
    11 years ago

    Dark oil you shouldn't swear!

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    • Darkoil
      11 years ago

      Because?

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  • dinz
    11 years ago

    I was in a similar incident in my second year electronic class except the student I was assigned to was extremely shy and quiet. He had learning and social interaction difficulties. It got to a point where I basically did everything. I did try to teach him but it came to no avail.

    Frustrated I began to stop organising times where we would get together to do our assignments. I would do the entire thing myself. I informed the teacher of my concerns but being so late into the school year there wasn't much we could do.

    But I realised it was more frustrating for him because he couldn't fathom the basics. The irony is that because I did everything by myself, in the final exam I got the highest mark in the class.

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      11 years ago

      Yeah youre right, you probably learned a lot. AT least the marks you got were reflective of your efforts alone. I guess that's the silver lining :)

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      • 1000yrVampireKing
        11 years ago

        Could you possibly request to your professor to switch partners? I always hated group work myself.

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        • 5796
          11 years ago

          I asked if its possible to switch but the prof said no because its too late in the term. Plus, another unlucky person would just be burdened with him. On the bright side he will surely flunk out after this term!

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