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Letter to a B student

Your final grade for the course is B. A respectable grade. Far superior to the \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 distinction 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.

Letter to a B student 写给中等生的一封信

你的期末成绩是一个B，一个过得去的等级。比许多年以前的及格C等级要优秀多了。但是A等级在那个年代是十分少见的，我回想起来25个人里只有两个人。但不管我们的标准如何，它们还是在提升的，不过你可能会因为这个结果为自己没有考好而失望。我相信我说什么都无法消除你们心中的失望情绪，特别是在一个社会环境下等级的高低直接决定了你考的学校和拿到的特别项目好坏。

你的失望感。负面的展望由这种情绪形成：失败、努力不够、好位置与好名声的丧失。成功的核心是在零和博弈的游戏中没有批发的成功可以供给，有了一个人的失败才能成为另一个人成功的垫脚石。你所生所长的社会是唯成功论的，失败或者破产绝对是要命的罪恶。因为财富的多少明确的决定了未来能否被拯救。也

许在另一个不一样的社会中，你对于失望的情绪能一笑而过，不过在我们的社会中不可能。

我写这篇文章的目的是客观判断你们的失望情绪，认真考虑你的等级意味着什么与不能说明什么，我不想在这里争辩成绩无用论，相反我希望告诉你们的是，如果只是被它的外表所蒙蔽，那对于你们与他人来说，都是一种可怕的导向。

作为大学成绩单的一种象征，你的成绩只能表明你已经成功的完成了特定课程的学习，达到了一定等级的熟练度。不过这种衡量你的表现的标准还是由传统的任务决定：参加考试、写论文报告等等。因为这种表现普遍认为应该与所掌握、记住知识的多少相结合，但是我们也知道这种假设是值得推敲的，有可能你学到的比成绩单上反应出来的要多，也有可能要少。在缺少更精准的测量工具的情况下，我们只能认为你的B代表着你对于这门学科的掌握不够，充其量是一个不明确的标志。

你的成绩也不能成为衡量基本能力与性格的标准。勇气、善良、智慧、好脾气，这些才是我们人类的重要性格特征。虽然它们因为批发量少很重要，但不幸的是它们无法成为我们课程学习中的一部分。当然如果你看重自己拥有的这些性格特征，那么就总会有出头之日——而且远比那些只重视纸上那一点可怜分数的人好得多。你的B等级是衣服外的价格标签，穿上生活的衣裳后就与标签没有任何关系了。

作为表现者与作为人类这个身份的学生是不一样的，这种差别需要我们时刻牢记。第一次学习这种区别是在我参军期重新回到校园的时候。当时有一大群像我

一样的人，比一般的学生要老，着急着赶快获得学位继续生活，对学术生活里的习惯和考试极不耐烦。这是一群不怎么好对付的学生。

我感觉其中一位用了一种明智的方法对付我们。每当星期天的晚上，他就会来到当地酒吧，那里总有许多GI-Bill的学生光顾。他会坐下来和他们喝酒、开玩笑，和班上的学生们分享各种故事。那些学生们最近刚换下他们参军的制服，有曾经排里的中士、轰炸机驾驶员、下士、陆军上尉、中尉、指挥官、陆军上校，其中甚至有陆军中校。所有人都十分享受与他交流，他自己也是。第二天早上，他会走进教室后分发卷子给所有人考试，一场会有一半人挂掉的艰难考试。

奇怪的是，挂掉的那些人也不会讨厌他。他们也不会厌恶他身份的变化，从一个友善的朋友变成压迫性的老师。相反他们喜欢他所以会在他的课上不断努力学习，最终学期结束的时候很好的掌握这门课程——经济学。这样的教书技巧我都无法解释清楚，但我相信，他很好的区分了学生们的身份，作为教室里的学习者和单纯的人类身份。这样的区分客观的判断了你的失望与你得到的B。

客观性。尽管人们在阶层上、获得教育的程度都不一样，但从根本上大家吸收的知识都来自相同的生活素材，也因为有共同的情感紧密连接，开心也好害怕也罢，遭受的痛苦与获得的成就。认识到这点是重要的。战争、疾病、公共和私人中的重大变故，这些是生活中更大的共通点。意识到这点后会发觉社会标签其实是一种基本的无关与误导。这些标签在复杂的社会职责分配中确实很有必要，我们需要知道能相信谁，他又能做什么，所以就有分数、等级、职位、责任的差异。但是从人性出发的时候这些真的不需要太过看重，看待自身还是别人都一样。

即便是从成就看，B这个标签也并不意味着你永远就是只能达到B成就的人。我清楚的知道B档的学生以后还可能得到B就像A档学生还会更容易取得A。但是学术学习只是一条窄窄的限定好的高速公路，毕业出去后碰到的就是杂乱无章的田野，充满波折。你曾经学到的东西也许在开始能帮你找到要走的路，但接下来就都要靠自己，在阻止我们前行的漫天大雾中定位目标、找准机遇了。