The student as performer, the student as human being. The distinction is one we should always keep in mind. I fires learned it years ago when I go out of the service and went back to college. There were lot of us then: older than the norm, in a hurry to get our degrees and move on, impatient with tests and rituals of academic life. Not an 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 student. There he would think and drink, joke, and swap stories with man in his class. Men who had but recently put away their uniforms and identities: former platoon sergeants, bomber pilots corporals, captains, lieutenants, commander, 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 hard test on which he usually flunked about half on them.
Oddly enough, the man whom he flunked did not resent it. Nor did then resent him for shifting suddenly from a friendly gear to a coercive one. Rather, they loved him, work 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 describe to be one in which a clear distinction was made between the students as classroom performer and the students as human being. A good 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 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 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 means that you are permanently defined as a B achievement person. I’m aware that B student 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.
要自己翻译的,谢谢