Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Quality & Quantity

It is fascinating to see how people often focus on their demands for qualities instead of quantities, despite the fact that they themselves fail to carry out the message via own behaviours. Look at the many advertisements across highway and television show cases, putting the slogan such as “Quantity does not matter, but the quality,” and “We provide quality services.”  How they truly define the terms quality and quantity really? And how they differentiate from one to another apart from the alphabetic differences? Time is different now, so is the life and its people. Back then, academic achievement is seen as something qualitative, where the higher we go, the better we are. Nonetheless, it is somehow more towards the quantitative side in the current days, where the higher we achieved not necessarily equals to better skills or higher knowledge. Why so? Look at the so called quality education system; there may be tons of doctorate holders as educators, but the work they produce might not even meet the lowest level of quality. How pathetic. In this case, education achievement is more on the measure of quantity, because the higher we achieve simply shows the longer list under the column of academic achievement as we draft out on our resume. Seriously, where is the quality? Well, some of us may say educators are there merely to assist us in academic growth, and spoon feeding does us no good at all. Indeed we are not supposed to be overly dependent on people whom we assume to be reliable as knowledge sources, where we only seek them for assistance, but here’s the catch. If they cannot provide moderate or high quality assistance, what else do we do? Depend on self may be one way, or perhaps we seek for other better sources. So, at the end of the day, we still seek for quality even when it comes to help and assistance. And when the educators cannot meet our needs, what is the point of us registering ourselves into private institution for the quality education as they claim and pay tons of money for the unmet standards? Quality and quantity; what a argumentative topic when given the right case study.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Peer Pressure




In one Hong Kong drama series, a female cop accepted the ex boy friend’s marriage proposal in public, accompanied by tons of people who non-stop urging her to say yes. Ignore the fact that situation like this only occurs in created stories and the probability of it actually takes place in reality, did the person really say yes because she still has feelings for him or merely due to the pressure applying by the public? It is fun indeed when we start repeating some words such as “kiss her” in particular situation, intending to urge the recipient(s) to commit in some behavior where the crowd follows our lead and repetition continues. From one point of view, we may see it as something positive and hence, there’s nothing wrong with doing so. Nonetheless, things might be viewed differently as we judge it from a different angle. In another words, we may urge people in terms of decision making in which we think is good for them, but will we be the one who is responsible of the subsequent consequence? Certainly, some of us may say we should be credited if the person who listens to our advice actually succeeded. What about when it happens the other way round where things went wrong? Will we be brave enough to admit our contribution to such unwanted incidences? Well, it is the person’s choice of making which leads him to current situation, regardless the outcome of success or failure. But how many do realize the fact that what we say not only may, but do indeed affect how the others come to finalizing their thoughts? Believe it or not, the peer pressure is there, working in different degrees, depending on how strong the recipient’s mind or determinism is.