Communication 1

Voices From The Front
Unedited Testimony from 1-0h-1 students Final Peer Evaluation
"Hall Hath No Fury Like A Team Member Scorned"

Not a good word to say about this guy. If he were to graduate from College of Communication and Fine Arts, it would not only be a disgrace to the College, but also lower the credibility of Bradley University as a whole. I can honestly say I am dumber for talking to the clown and award him no points.

He was a central negative with no creative idea generation. He was a weed that sucked the life out of the group. On a positive note, it was always fun to laugh at him. During a meeting at the library during crunch time when we were meeting at midnight to accommodate, Wendy's schedule, the clown showed up high. The rest of the group had been there for a half an hour at the computers. I could tell he was high about 10 feet away and very loudly began to ask him if was high. He pleaded to stop saying things like that so loud. He never showed up to a meeting high again.

Not that he would have been any help sober, but I’ll be damned with all the work I put in, that he was going to just veg out while Susan and myself carried John and Wendy At least Wendy was occasionally helpful. The Clown physically attended meetings, and his idea of helping was to look up cartoons of orgies for our presentation for an example of a small group. The work that he tried to do for the presentation was ridiculously horrible. I redid his part. Not only was this project not a priority, but an inconvenience to the clown. I no longer use the term clown in a joking matter.

I hated socializing with him and he took criticism horribly. When I told him that was going to fix what he did for the power point, he got defensive and told me not to change it. He couldn’t figure out how to fit the words on a slide. I can understand if he didn’t know how, but he told me he knew how to use power point. Now I am only bitching, but through my five years at Bradley University I can honestly say that I have never met a more useless team member.

Member: The Clown
Score: 20/100

The CLOWN is one of my deadbeat group members with a capital D. Not only could I not stand him as a person, but he also was a terrible group member. Clown did give us a bit of info for the project that was worth it, however, near the end, he contributed close to nothing. Clown never seemed to understand our topic. I think when we were finishing up and doing our power point slides, he asked us what our topic was! His ideas were so off the wall and unreachable at any stage of the game. His ideas usually started with "wouldn’t it be cool if…", but the idea was so obviously not able to be carried out. Clown usually did not try to get ideas out of others unless he was angry and he would yell at us to give ideas. Clown did not exert leadership in the group what so ever. He is a big talker. Every once in a while near the end of the project, Clown would call me and talk about how we really need to get going on the presentation (his idea of leadership) and I would say well ok, lets set a meeting time. And he’d say "oh I’m busy". He was really never willing to do any work outside of class or meetings. He never researched as we ever asked him to. We would beg him to get some research considering he didn’t do much else. The willingness of the Clown working with others was not a problem; however, the way he worked with others was his problem. He liked to shove off the work to others in the group and then get the credit for it. No research skills. Clown’s motivation was not for the group. He usually attended the meetings that were always set around his partying. When he comes to meetings – he is high. I think I remember two meetings where he was NOT high. It was amazing at how much easier it was to conduct the meeting. When he is high – we have to explain things to him five times and we get nothing done because he is talking about how pretty the walls look or something weird like that. Clown absolutely never did anything without being told to do it; actually, he barley even did what he was told! The project only seemed important at the end when he realized that this was graded . I did not enjoy being with the Clown, ever. When I see him outside of class, I avoid having to talk to him. He is not positive; in fact, he gives the group a negative vibe when he is there. He did however; listen to other group members when they were talking. He did not understand what they were saying half the time, but he did listen. The CLOWN gets a 20/100, which is charity in my book.

Well, now that the semester is over…I can really let it all hang out. I’ll start with Joni due to the fact that I’ve got a lot to say about her. She was careless, selfish, unreliable, inconsequential, and narcissistic. She said she’d do things and she’d either not do them or not do them correctly. She came up with ideas for things that I went along with just to shut her up and we ended up using the ideas. Tom saved most of them, but we should have been more aggressive. Her war story started off as a rap song…that wasn’t related to the topic….AT ALL. Then the story went on to describe something completely unrelated to small group leadership. I mean, seriously, she just didn’t get it at all. She gets a big fat F-. She may have been trying, so I didn’t give her an 0. That’s the only reason why.

"How else can I say it? You put us in a car without a spare tire (Tracy) and 1 mile down the road we realize we have a flat tire. That was Anastasie. She constantly argued with whatever we wanted to do. I even had to argue with her to print a copy of the outline just for safe-keeping. Whatever decision we tried to make as a group she had to take the opposite view, even thought she rarely knew what was going on. She would moan, groan, pout, and tell us "we did not get it" - definitely not of this planet. Only the high level of cohesion in this group helped us transcend such a malignant virus. Her contribution to the work was garbage. We were all ready to vote her out weeks ago. Susan and John asked me several time to vote her out, but I declined because I thought it too rude to it. But if she is going to get the same grade as we do, I will vote her out if I can, even if its in the middle of our presentation on Monday. She has completely lost the respect of the entire group. She weighted us down and the rest of us had to work that much harder to recover. I've said enough now, it 4:30 a.m. and I'm' tired, I'm relieved and I' m ready to kick ass on this presentation to give a presentation that the group, the class, and you will be proud of. Perhaps I will dream of the future, and finding and buying the company Anastaie works for, it order to have the delightful pleasure of terminating her employment. So even thought I feel I could give a 50 minute presentation or write a 10 page full content outline on how bad Anastasia was to work with, I'm sure other group members will capture the points I missed. Good night!

"She does not deserve a good grade. She deserve a bad grade. The saying goes that if you are not with us, and she was not with us. I watched the other members of my group reach out to her on several occasions and she would not respond. As it came closer to presentation time, she tired to jump the train, I mean jump off, not jump on. I am still under the impression that we should have voted her out. Yes that would of been mean, but not as mean as trying to bring down the rescue boat when you are already drowning with no chance of survival. She was disrespectful and inconsiderate. She argued with us on everything from what computer to use to where to meet in the library. The only thing she is good at is racing out as soon as class is over, so she does not have to meet with the group or account for her negligence. She did for small group communication what Jonestown did for Kool-aid. She also made a spectacle of the presentation with her bizarre interpretation of being a debate mediator, I still have no ideas what she was trying to pull off. She was absolutely the worst member I have ever worked with on a project. I repeat, she does not deserve a good grade, she deserves a bad grade."

"I've actually not been looking forward to this moment. One side of me says that Dean's problem was his social skills, he never really clicked with the group and that rolled over onto his work ethic because quite clearly he never had any understanding of the topic or what was going on in the group. The "objective cynic" side of me says "my god, his major is speech communication and he can't even read off an outline during a presentation?" Objectively Dean contributed nothing to the group. Sure, he was at the meetings, that's about as impressive as saying he just happened to be a big lump of carbon in the right place at the right time. I truly empathize with him. I understand that being in a group with people you don't know is like being thrown into the water and being told to sink or swim. But he made no visible effort to swim - he just let the weight of his brick head suck him to the bottom." When I think of how many hours of sleep I lost because of one group member it makes me furious. I can think of no time during the entire semester that Dean contributed to the group by his own hand. However, it is probably in your best interest not to flunk Dean as doing so would only subject some poor, unfortunate future group to his complete lack of knowledge, skill, and motivation."

"Susan and I are writing you in regards to our Com 1-0h-1 project and the complete lack of assistance of our group members. We have put hours of work and energy into completing this project but our fellow members have done nothing. We all as a group agree on a time to meet, we change times according to the individual needs of the group members and still they do not show up. The last meeting they actually came to because "we don't want ya'll to give us bad grades." Honestly, we didn't care why they decide to finally come, we were just glad they did. At his meeting we all were given assignments of what to have turned into me on Friday so Susan and I could finish the PowerPoint and paper, Jill gave me a paper I wouldn't have turned into my second grade teacher. Brain and Will couldn't even follow the simplest assignment - graphics!! Oh my!?! Susan and I are doing this entire project by ourselves and it’s absolutely infuriating. We just can take it anymore. We have tried to give them better peer reviews then they deserve, on the assumption that they would soon start to help. But it has only gotten worse. Normally, we don't care what grades people get as long as we get the grade we earned, but honestly this is so upsetting. Both Susan and I have had some health problems this semester and to have the two people who are in and out of the hospitals and labs doing the work of the entire group is uncalled for. But, really what do we do when we have written the paper, done the PowerPoint, written the speaker notes , done the outline...are we supposed to just hand them the section they need to read like they actually did some redeemable work? I don't care as much that we may earn them a better grade, but I do care that they may lower mine when they get up there in front of class and speak like the ignorant slabs of cement that they are. They won’t speak well because they don't posses the ability and mostly because they won’t understand what the hell they are talking about because they haven't even read the chapter let alone done research. “

Last week I gave them “scary clown” ratings because I thought "they said they would help this weekend." But they have not, what they really deserve protoplasm doesn't accurately describe. Not only do they not contribute, not attend meetings and not care, but they are all perfectly content in knowing that they will receive a good grade on this project of which they have contributed nothing. Susan and my GPA determine whether or not we attend school and we are students who earn good grade because we work hard it. To have those three incompetent, armpit hairs receive grades like this is repulsive and to have mine and Susan’s grades lowered because of those ignorant, incompetent, pathetic fools makes me vomit. We are going crazy. Please let us know what exactly can or can not be done in this situation. We apologize for the tone of this email. We in no way meant to lash out at you, but rather express our situation in hopes of you shedding a glimmer of light."