1、Letter to a B student Your final grade for the course is B. A respectable grade. Far superior to the Gentlemans C that served as the norm a couple of generations ago. But in those days As were rare: only two out of twenty-five, as I recall. Whatever our norm is, it has shifted upward, with the resul

2、t that you are probably disappointed at not doing better. Im 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. Disappointment. Its the stuff bad dreams are made of: dreams

3、of failure, inadequacy, loss of position and good repute. The essence of success is that theres never enough of it to go round in a zero-sum game where one persons winning must be offset by anothers losing, one persons joy offset by anothers disappointment. Youve grown up in a society where winning

4、is not the most important thingits the only thing. To lose, to fail, to go under, to go brokethese are deadly sins in a world where prosperity in the present is seen as a sure sign of salvation in the future. In a different society, your disappointment might be something you could shrug away. But no

5、t in ours. My purpose in writing you is to put your disappointment in perspective by considering exactly what your grade means and doesnt mean. I do not propose 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 mislea

6、ding, both to you and to others. As a symbol on your college transcript, your grade simply means that you have successfully completed a specific course of study, doing so at a certain level of proficiency. The level of your proficiency has been determined by your performance of rather conventional t

7、asks: 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 youve actually gotten much more out of the course than your

8、 grade indicatesor less. Lacking more precise measurement tools, we must interpret your B as a rather fuzzy symbol at best, representing a questionable judgment of your mastery of the subject. Your grade does not represent a judgment of your basic ability or of your character. Courage, kindness, wis

9、dom, good humorthese are the important characteristics of our species. Unfortunately they are not part of our curriculum. But they are important: crucially so, because they are always in short supply. If you value these characteristics in yourself, you will be valuedand far more so than those whose

10、identities are measured only by little marks on a piece of paper. Your B is a price tag on a garment that is quite separate 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 i

11、t years ago when I got out of the service 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 wisely, it seems to me.

12、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 class, men who had but recently put away their uniforms and identities: former platoon sergeants, bom

13、ber pilots, corporals, captains, lieutenants, commanders, majorseven a lieutenant colonel, as I recall. They enjoyed his company greatly, as he theirs. The next morning he would walk into class and give these same men a test. A hard test. A test on which he usually flunked about half of them. Oddly

14、enough, the men whom he flunked did not resent it. Nor did they resent him for shifting suddenly from a friendly gear to a coercive one. Rather, they loved him, worked harder and harder at his course as the semester moved along, and ended up with a good grasp of his subjecteconomics. The technique i

15、s 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 perspectiveand your disappointment

16、. 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 together by common bonds of fear and joy, suffering and achievement. Warfare, sickness, disasters, public and privatethese are

17、the larger coordinates of life. To recognize them is to recognize that social labels are basically irrelevant and misleading. It is true that these 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

18、to make distinctions on the basis of grades, degrees, rank, and responsibility. But these distinctions should never be taken seriously in human terms, either in the way we look at others or in the way we look at ourselves.Even in achievement terms, your B label does not mean that you are permanently

19、 defined as a B achievement person. Im well aware that B students tend to get Bs in the courses they take later on, just as A students tend to get As. But academic work is a narrow, neatly defined highway compared to the unmapped rolling country you will encounter after you leave school. What you ha

20、ve learned may help you find your way about at first; later on you will have to shift to yourself, locating goals and opportunities in the same fog that hampers us all as we move toward the future.Letter to a B student 寫給中等生的一封信你的期末成績是一個B，一個過得去的等級。比許多年以前的及格C等級要優(yōu)秀多了。但是A等級在那個年代是十分少見的，我回想起來25個人里只有兩個人。但

21、不管我們的標準如何，它們還是在提升的，不過你可能會因為這個結果為自己沒有考好而失望。我相信我說什么都無法消除你們心中的失望情緒，特別是在一個社會環(huán)境下等級的高低直接決定了你考的學校和拿到的特別項目好壞。你的失望感。負面的展望由這種情緒形成：失敗、努力不夠、好位置與好名聲的喪失。成功的核心是在零和博弈的游戲中沒有批發(fā)的成功可以供給，有了一個人的失敗才能成為另一個人成功的墊腳石。你所生所長的社會是唯成功論的，失敗或者破產(chǎn)絕對是要命的罪惡。因為財富的多少明確的決定了未來能否被拯救。也許在另一個不一樣的社會中，你對于失望的情緒能一笑而過，不過在我們的社會中不可能。我寫這篇文章的目的是客觀判斷你們的失望

22、情緒，認真考慮你的等級意味著什么與不能說明什么，我不想在這里爭辯成績無用論，相反我希望告訴你們的是，如果只是被它的外表所蒙蔽，那對于你們與他人來說，都是一種可怕的導向。作為大學成績單的一種象征，你的成績只能表明你已經(jīng)成功的完成了特定課程的學習，達到了一定等級的熟練度。不過這種衡量你的表現(xiàn)的標準還是由傳統(tǒng)的任務決定：參加考試、寫論文報告等等。因為這種表現(xiàn)普遍認為應該與所掌握、記住知識的多少相結合，但是我們也知道這種假設是值得推敲的，有可能你學到的比成績單上反應出來的要多，也有可能要少。在缺少更精準的測量工具的情況下，我們只能認為你的B代表著你對于這門學科的掌握不夠，充其量是一個不明確的標志。你的

23、成績也不能成為衡量基本能力與性格的標準。勇氣、善良、智慧、好脾氣，這些才是我們人類的重要性格特征。雖然它們因為批發(fā)量少很重要，但不幸的是它們無法成為我們課程學習中的一部分。當然如果你看重自己擁有的這些性格特征，那么就總會有出頭之日而且遠比那些只重視紙上那一點可憐分數(shù)的人好得多。你的B等級是衣服外的價格標簽，穿上生活的衣裳后就與標簽沒有任何關系了。作為表現(xiàn)者與作為人類這個身份的學生是不一樣的，這種差別需要我們時刻牢記。第一次學習這種區(qū)別是在我參軍期重新回到校園的時候。當時有一大群像我一樣的人，比一般的學生要老，著急著趕快獲得學位繼續(xù)生活，對學術生活里的習慣和考試極不耐煩。這是一群不怎么好對付的學生。我感覺其中一位用了一種明智的方法對付我們。每當星