Letter to a B student
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Your final grade for the cour is B. A respectable grade. Far superior to the "Gentleman's C" that rved as the norm a couple of generations ago. But in tho days A's were rare: only two out of twenty-five, as I recall. Whatever our norm is, it has shifted upward, with the result that you are probably disappointed at not doing better. I'm certain that nothing I can say will remove that feeling of disappointment, particularly in a climate where grades determine eligibility for graduate school and special programs.
araby Disappointment. It's the stuff bad dreams are made of: dreams of failure, inadequacy, loss of position and good repute. The esnce of success is that there's never enough of it to go round in a zero-sum game where one person's winning must be offt by another's losing, one person's joy offt by another's disappointment. You've grown up in a society where winning is not the most important thing—it's the only thing. To lo, to fail, to go under, to go broke—the are deadly sins in a world where prosperity in the prent is en as a sure sign of salvation in the future. In a different society, your disappointment might be something you could shrug away. But not in ours.
My purpo in writing you is to put your disappointment in perspective by considering exactly what your grade means and doesn't mean. I do not propo to argue here that grades are unimportant. Rather, I hope to show you that your grade, taken at face value, is apt to be dangerously misleading, both to you and to others.栗色
As a symbol on your college transcript, your grade simply means that you have successfully completed a specific cour of study, doing so at a certain level of proficiency. The level of your proficiency has been determined by your performance of rather conventional tasks: taking tests, writing papers and reports, and so forth. Your performance is generally assumed to correspond to the knowledge you have acquired and will retain. But this assumption, as we both know, is questionable; it may well be that you've actually gotten much more out of the cour than your grade indicates—or less. Lacking more preci measurement tools, we must interpret your B as a rather fuzzy symbol at best, reprenting a questionable judgment of your mastery of the subject.
Your grade does not reprent a judgment of your basic ability or of your character. Co
urage, kindness, wisdom, good humor—the are the important characteristics of our species. Unfortunately they are not part of our curriculum. But they are important: crucially so, becau they are always in short supply. If you value the characteristics in yourlf, you will be valued—and far more so than tho who identities are measured only by little marks on a piece of paper. Your B is a price tag on a garment that is quite parate from the living, breathing human being underneath.
The student as performer; the student as human being. The distinction is one we should always keep in mind. I first learned it years ago when I got out of the rvice and went back to college. There were a lot of us then: older than the norm, in a hurry to get our degrees and move on, impatient with the tests and rituals of academic life. Not an easy group to handle.
One instructor handled us very wily, it ems to me. On Sunday evenings in particular, he would make a point of stopping in at a local bar frequented by many of the GI-Bill students. There he would sit and drink, joke, and swap stories with men in his clas
商务英语写作s, men who had but recently put away their uniforms and identities: former platoon rgeants, bomber pilots, corporals, captains, lieutenants, commanders, majors—even a lieutenant colonel, as I recall. They enjoyed his company greatly, as he theirs. The next morning he would walk into class and give the same men a test. A hard test. A test on which he usually flunked about half of them.scarface
如何提高课堂教学的有效性
catch my breath Oddly enough, the men whom he flunked did not rent it. Nor did they rent him for shifting suddenly from a friendly gear to a coercive one. Rather, they loved him, worked harder and harder at his cour as the mester moved along, and ended up with a good grasp of his subject—economics. The technique is still rather difficult for me to explain; but I believe it can be described as one in which a clear distinction was made between the student as classroom performer and the student as human being. A good distinction to make. A distinction that should put your B in perspective—and your disappointment.
Perspective. It is important to recognize that human beings, despite differences in class and educational labeling, are fundamentally hewn from the same material and knit tva读音
ogether by common bonds of fear and joy, suffering and achievement. Warfare, sickness, disasters, public and private—the are the larger coordinates of life. To recognize them is to recognize that social labels are basically irrelevant and misleading. It is true that the labels are necessary in the functioning of a complex society as a way of letting us know who should be trusted to do what, with the result that we need to make distinctions on the basis of grades, degrees, rank, and responsibility. But the distinctions should never be taken riously in human terms, either in the way we look at others or in the way we look at ourlves.
大学英语综合教程
