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.
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.万圣节的英文歌
topright>single ladies歌词 Your grade does not reprent a judgment of your basic ability or of your character. Co
最经典的英文歌曲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.
step up 4 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
computersciences, 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.
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.
unlovable 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 t
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.
