Letter to a B student 课文原文

?Letter to a B student
Your final grade for the course is B. A respectable grade. Far superior to the "Gentleman's C" that served as the norm a couple of generations ago. But in those 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.
Disappointment. It's the stuff bad dreams are made of: dreams of failure, inadequacy, loss of position and good repute. The essence 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 offset by another's losing, one person's joy offset 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 lose, to fail, to go under, to go broke—these 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 not in ours.
My purpose in writing you is to put your disappointment in perspective by considering exactly what your grade means and doesn't 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 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 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 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 course than your grade indicates—or 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, wisdom, good humor—these 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 valued—and far more so than those whose 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 dist

inction is one we should always keep in mind. I first learned it 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. 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, 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 these 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 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 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 together by common bonds of fear and joy, suffering and achievement. Warfare, sickness, disasters, public and private—these are 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 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 defined as a B achievement person. I'm well aware that B students tend to get B's in the courses they take later on, just as A students tend to get A's. But academic work is a narrow, neatly defined highway compared to the unmapped rolling country you will encounter after you leave school. What you have 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.