Wangshu Song
Analysis Essay
Jim Schnaedter
June 11, 2016
“Mis–Perception”
Due to the intense competitive pressure in today’s society, people always pay a lot of attention to their apparels and decorations in order to show off their taste and ability in front of others. They believe that dressiness could to some extent represent that they are careful and systematical especially when they firstly meet someone. However, as a famous saying goes, “Never judge a book by its cover”. In order to truly know a person, we need to go beyond their looks and dresses and focus on more profound aspects. From my experience, initial perception may represent some kinds of traits of one person, but we cannot judge a person completely by the initial perception.
Since I was a little girl, my parents always taught me to be cultured on the clothes and didn't allow me to go anywhere unclean. They always say that people are more willing to social with dressy people especially when they are not familiar with you. Therefore, because of the influence from my parents, I often judge a person by my initial perception toward his or her dresses instead of comprehensive quality. However, one thing happened in my high school changed my opinion about if I should judge a person only by the initial perception.
When I was in high school, I used to be the librarian of my high school library. When I did the interview to get my job, my teacher made a very good comment to me and also mentioned that I was a very careful girl because my school uniform still looked like a new one. One year later, I became the head librarian of my school library and my first task was to hire some new librarians. When I did the interview, I met a boy who looks didn't meet any of my requirements. He was in an old and ill-fitting school uniform and one of his shoes lace was loose. The boy didn't give me a good enough perception at first because of his clothes. His dressing style made me think that he is a careless and disorganized person. I wanted to reject him at first but my colleagues insisted that his answer to the questions was well organized. Meanwhile, other interviewers’ time schedule could not fulfill my requirements therefore I decided to give him a probationary position. What he did during this period of time really changed my attitude toward him.
When he began to work in the library, he was careful toward everything and rarely made mistakes on his duties. Several days later, he came to my place and told me that he felt high school students were losing interest toward literature beyond textbook. Then, he told me that he wanted to hold a book comment competition to evoke students’ interest toward literature. When I was still hesitating about if his suggestion could work or not, he showed me his plan paper which had detailed in everything. I was also attracted by this activity and surprised about his ability at the same time. The book comment competition was really successful under his effort. He went to each classroom to paste the poster about the competition and encouraged classmates to take part in the competition. He also went to find the headmaster to write the certification in order to appeal more students to join the competition. Meanwhile, he also invited several Chinese and history teachers in our school to be the judges of the competition, which made the result of the competition look fair enough. The book comment competition raised good echo among students and more and more people came to the library to borrow some famous novels. Besides of the competition, the boy also showed his ability toward other things. When he bought the goods for the library, he always contacted many stores and compared the price and quality of goods between them, which means that he is really a careful and organized person. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the criteria of judging a person are extremely complex. Various as the standards might be, judging a person by appearance is the most unreliable one. We should better draw a conclusion about a person through a long period of observations, interactions, and communication.