Program Evaluation

I am so frustrated with my program evaluation class right now. The element of competition is making people play dirty, which reminds me why people are horrible and selfish and capitalism is evil. I also feel like my group is not prepared to do much critical thinking, making it difficult for me to explore complexity and nuance with my peers.

The one group that really seems to have the eye of the teacher (so, he will probably give them all A's and the rest of us B's) is headed by a girl who appears to be willing to undermine her classmates in order to improve her own chances of winning. She spent the majority of our question time in class today asking a question that we didn't understand, then criticizing us for how "idealistic" our answer and model to her were. We spent the time defending a facet of our presentation we didn't choose to focus on. It was so frustrating.


On top of that, the format for the class was not at all conducive to debating the tensions and chaos of the program evaluation process, which is ironically what we started to do when that girl was attacking our presentation, and it did not work out well for us. To make things even worse, we all had to evaluate who we thought the best presentation was, and the results factor into our grades, which doesn't strike me as fair or particularly conducive to creativity and struggle.

This class is the exact opposite of everything I have come to love about my Rhetoric classes. In fact, I feel the best thing I've gotten from this class is a reminder how awesome rhetoric is for its inclusive, non-judgmental commitment to justice for every participant in a rhetorical situation. It's also a reminder that academia in more "practical" disciplines is still stuck in one way or another apart from the outside world. The thing that makes rhetoric better to me is that it has a pattern in place to acknowledge its own limitations and an understanding of the dynamic nature of rhetorical situations, whereas nonprofit management is guilty of simple adherence to the American need to slap a credential on everything and look for an easy solution.