Evaluations

Whenever I chat with Amazon or WordPress for assistance of one kind or another, I receive an email afterwards to ask me to evaluate my experience. I hate evaluations in general, and also in principle–giving or receiving–but I know evaluation is necessary for a functional business or society. Surely without holding ourselves to a standard, things will be in chaos. However understanding of it doesn’t make me like evaluation one bit more. I still detest it. The necessity of doing an evaluation only adds to my distress since now I feel guilty of hating the evaluation so much. If I were a teacher, I will give everybody A. If I were a member of Olympic committee of any sort, I will give the championship to every participant. Well, I should never hold such jobs or assume such responsibilities.

I think my dislike of evaluation comes from those years after years of experiences in a high pressured education system of Asia. The high pressure is actually not the primary evil of the whole thing, but rather the emphasis on memory and the overt competition with peers. Now so many years after that, I still feel the chill of it and the madness of it. And what’s the result? I’ve forgotten most of the things I learned. Now I am writing most of the time, which is something I love outside of my schoolwork–actually schoolwork only took time away from my reading of those books I love. So what’s the point? Years of wasted memorization only fossilized the mind and the relentless competition only damaged healthy friendships upon which we can build life long emotional support. And I think evaluation underlies the whole system. Probably I am overreacting towards evaluation, but I can’t help it.