Michael Vazquez

Ms. Aponte
Tech Prep 11
September 17, 2014

Death Swamp Expository Essay

What can you do as a team to achieve your goal? You can do what my team did and think of more
than one way to achieve a goal and try out all of your ideas. Death Swamp is a project where we had a
team of five people and we had to get from point A to point B without touching the ground. We only had 5
lengths of 2X4s and one length of rope. We each had to make it to the end without any of the objects or
teammates falling in the swamp.
How did we do it? It took a couple of tries but after learning from our mistakes, we came up with
a plan to cross. Achieving this project would not be possible if it werent for our teammates. My
teammates were Asia, Kathy, Julissa, Anthony, Jordy, and myself. We would discuss what we thought we
were doing wrong and how we can come up with a way to fix the problem. After a number of failed ideas,
we were successful. We had the biggest person go first to carry all the wood to each cinderblock. Then we
would have another person cross with the person in front. And we would continue the process until our
entire team crossed.
We each had different roles in the group to make it work. Kathy was the captain, I was the person
to go ahead of everyone, Asia helped pass the wood to Kathy, Anthony followed behind me, Jordy gave
us the wood, and Julissa supervised. It didnt start out like that but after we realized what we were doing
wrong, we switched it to those roles. Being that there were more groups than ours, there was competition.
The other teams kept trying to mess us up by running around us and screaming. None of us flinched

which is another reason why we made it to the end. The only part that made the group nervous is when we
didnt know if the wood was long enough or not to fit across to the other cinderblock.
The part I liked the most about this activity was that we were outside doing something active. I
learned how to communicate with some people I didnt know and how to work as a team to do something
challenging. We learned how to think outside of the box and how to survive in death swamp