2022年Unit7LettertoaBStudent課文翻譯綜合教程二

1、Unit 7 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 th

2、e result 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:

3、dreams 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 w

4、inning 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.

5、 But not 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

6、 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 convent

7、ional 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 youve actually gotten much more out of the course th

8、an 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, kindn

9、ess, wisdom, 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 thos

10、e 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 distinction is one we should always keep in mind. I first l

11、earned 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

12、 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 sergea

13、nts, bomber 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

14、. 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 te

15、chnique 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 disa

16、ppointment. 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

17、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 tha

18、t 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

19、permanently 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.

20、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. 寫給中等生的一封信你的期末成果是一個B,一個過得去的等級；比很多年以前的及格C 等級要優(yōu)秀多了；但是 A 等級在那個歲月是非常少見的,我回想起來25 個人里只有兩個人；但不管我們的標(biāo)

21、準(zhǔn)如何, 它們?nèi)允窃谔嵘?不過你可能會由于這個結(jié)果為自己沒有考好而掃興；我信任我說什么都無法排除你們心中的掃興心情,考的學(xué)校和拿到的特殊項目好壞；特殊是在一個社會環(huán)境下等級的高低直接打算了你你的掃興感；負(fù)面的展望由這種心情形成：失敗、努力不夠、好位置與好名聲的丟失；勝利的核心是在零和博弈的嬉戲中沒有批發(fā)的勝利可以供應(yīng),有了一個人的失敗才能成為另一個人勝利的墊腳石； 你所生所長的社會是唯勝利論的,失敗或者破產(chǎn)肯定是要命的罪責(zé)；由于財寶的多少明確的打算了將來能否被挽救；或許在另一個不一樣的社會中,你對于掃興的情緒能一笑而過,不過在我們的社會中不行能；我寫這篇文章的目的是客觀判定你們的掃興心情,仔

22、細(xì)考慮你的等級意味著什么與不能說明什么, 我不想在這里爭論成果無用論,相反我期望告知你們的是,假如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(dǎo)向；作為高校成果單的一種象征,你的成果只能說明你已經(jīng)勝利的完成了特定課程的學(xué)習(xí),達到了肯定等級的嫻熟度；不過這種衡量你的表現(xiàn)的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)仍是由傳統(tǒng)的任務(wù)打算：參與考試、寫論文報告等等； 由于這種表現(xiàn)普遍認(rèn)為應(yīng)當(dāng)與所把握、記住學(xué)問的多少相結(jié)合,但是我們也知道這種假設(shè)是值得推敲的,有可能你學(xué)到的比成果單上反應(yīng)出來的要多,也有可能要少；在缺少更精準(zhǔn)的測量工具的情形下,我們只能認(rèn)為你的 夠,充其量是一個不明確的標(biāo)志；B 代表著你對于這門學(xué)科的把握不你的

23、成果也不能成為衡量基本才能與性格的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)；士氣、和善、聰明、好脾氣,這些才是我們?nèi)祟惖闹匾愿裉攸c；雖然它們由于批發(fā)量少很重要,但不幸的是它們無法成為我們課程學(xué)習(xí)中的一部分；當(dāng)然假如你看重自己擁有的這些性格特點,那么就總會有出頭之日而且遠(yuǎn)比那些只重視紙上那一點可憐分?jǐn)?shù)的人好得多；你的 簽,穿上生活的衣裳后就與標(biāo)簽沒有任何關(guān)系了；B 等級是衣服外的價格標(biāo)作為表現(xiàn)者與作為人類這個身份的同學(xué)是不一樣的,這種差別需要我們時刻牢記；第一次學(xué)習(xí)這種區(qū)分是在我參軍期重新回到校內(nèi)的時候；當(dāng)時有一大群像我一樣的人,比一般的同學(xué)要老, 焦急著趕快獲得學(xué)位連續(xù)生活,對學(xué)術(shù)生活里的習(xí)慣和考試極不耐煩；這是一群不怎么好應(yīng)付的同學(xué)；我感覺其中一位用了一種明智的方法應(yīng)付我們；每當(dāng)星期天的晚上,他就會來到當(dāng)?shù)鼐瓢?那里總