Unit 7 Letter to a B StudentYour finalgradeforthecourseis B.Arespectable grade.Far superiortotheGentlemans C that served as the norm a couple of generations ago. But in those daysAs were rare: only two out of twenty-five, as I recall. Whatever our norm is, it has shiftedupward,withtheresult thatyouare probablydisappointedatnotdoingbetter.Imcertain that nothing I can say will remove that feeling of disappointment, particularly in aclimate where grades determine eligibility for graduate school and special programs.Disappointment. Its the stuff bad dreams are made of: dreams of failure, inadequacy,loss of position and good repute. The essence of success is that theres never enough of itto go round in a zero-sum game where one persons winning must be offset by anotherslosing, one persons joy offset by anothers disappointment. Youve grown up in a societywhere winning is not the most important thingits the only thing. To lose, to fail, to gounder,to go broketheseare deadlysinsina world whereprosperityinthepresent isseen as a sure sign of salvation in the future. In a different society, your disappointmentmight be something you could shrug away. But not in ours.Mypurposeinwritingyouistoputyourdisappointmentinperspectivebyconsidering exactly what your grade means and doesnt mean. I do not propose to arguehere that grades are unimportant. Rather, I hope to show you that your grade, taken atface value, is apt to be dangerously misleading, both to you and to others.Asa symbolonyourcollegetranscript,yourgradesimplymeansthatyouhavesuccessfully completed a specific course of study, doing so at a certain level of proficiency.The level of your proficiencyhas beendetermined byyourperformanceofratherconventionaltasks:takingtests,writingpapersandreports,andso forth.Yourperformance is generally assumed to correspond to the knowledge you have acquired andwill retain. But this assumption,as we bothknow,is questionable;itmay well bethatyouve actually gotten much more out ofthe course than your grade indicates orless.Lackingmoreprecisemeasurementtools,wemustinterpretyourBas a ratherfuzzysymbol 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 humorthese are the important characteristics of ourspecies.Unfortunatelythey arenotpartofour curriculum.Buttheyareimportant:crucially so, because they are always in short supply. If you value these characteristics inyourself, you will be valuedand far more so than those whose identities are measuredonly by little marks on a piece of paper. Your B is a price tag on a garment that is quiteseparate from the living, breathing human being underneath.Thestudentas performer;thestudentas humanbeing.Thedistinctionis oneweshould always keep in mind. I first learned it years ago when I got out of the service andwent back to college. There were a lot of us then: older than the norm, in a hurry to getour degrees and move on, impatientwith thetests and ritualsofacademiclife. Notaneasy group to handle.Oneinstructorhandledusverywisely,it seems to me. On Sundayeveningsinparticular, he would make a point of stopping in at a local bar frequented by many of theGI-Bill students. Therehe wouldsit anddrink,joke,andswap storieswithmeninhisclass, men who had but recently put away their uniforms and identities: former platoonsergeants, bomber pilots, corporals, captains, lieutenants, commanders, majorseven alieutenant colonel, as I recall. They enjoyed his company greatly, as he theirs. The nextmorning he would walk into class and give these same men a test. A hard test. A test onwhich he usually flunked about half of them.Oddly enough, the men whom he flunked did not resent it. Nor did they resent himfor shiftingsuddenlyfromafriendlygeartoacoerciveone. Rather,theylovedhim,worked harder and harder at his course as the semester moved along, and ended up witha good grasp of hissubject economics.Thetechniqueis stillrather difficultforme toexplain; butI believeitcanbe describedas oneinwhicha cleardistinctionwas madebetweenthestudentas class