《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
fulfill their parents‘ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.
18 I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-rounded person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artist is a ―dumb‖ thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the ―dumb‖ courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in itself—she deserves to follow her muse.
19 Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.
20 ―I had a freshman student I‘ll call Linda,‖ one dean told me, ―who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I couldn‘t tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.‖ 21 The story is almost funny—except that it‘s not. It‘s symptomatic of all the pressures put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clack of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: ―Will I get everything done?‖ 22 Probably they won‘t. They will get sick. They will get ―blocked.‖ They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out. Hey Carlos, Help!
23 Part of the problem is that they do more than they are expected to do. A professor will assign five-page papers. Several students will start writing ten-page papers, and a few will raise the ante1 to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.
24 ―Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,‖ one dean points out, ―it‘s just bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic 1
Here ―ante‖ refers to a forced bet in the game of poker.
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works, psychologically.‖
25 Why can‘t the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor's main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and doesn‘t know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He didn‘t sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought from home. That‘s what deans, masters, chaplains1, and psychiatrists are for.
26 To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism2 has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students don‘t have as much time to spend. They also are overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their fingernails onto a shrinking profession. If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.
27 Ultimately it will be the student‘s own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents‘ dreams and their classmates‘ fears. They must be jolted into believing in themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.
28 ―Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,‖ says Carlos Horta. ―College should be open-ended; at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along, it's almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist—that they‘ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best-paying slot.‖
29 ―They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to a life of colorless mediocrity. They‘ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.‖
30 I have painted too drab a portrait of today‘s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is 12
See ―Background and Cultural Notes 4.‖ See ―Background and Cultural Notes 5.‖
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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
only half of their story: if they were so dreary I wouldn‘t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are unusually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.
31 Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extra-curricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it. 32 This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the ?60‘s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale‘s residential colleges as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.
33 They also can‘t afford to be the willing slave for organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper whose past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that ―newsies‖ routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today‘s student will write one or two articles a week, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I‘ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet. 34 If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it‘s because that‘s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It‘s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.
35 I tell students that there is no one ―right‖ way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell them that change
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is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway producers, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.
36 I ask them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail. Background and Culture Notes
1. Yale‘s residential college system, now more than 70 years old, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the College. Before freshman year, all incoming undergraduates are assigned to one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges. Students remain affiliated with their residential college for all 4 years (and beyond). Every residential college has its own master and dean, both of whom are Yale faculty members. The master is the chief administrative officer and the presiding faculty presence in each residential college. He or she is responsible for the physical well being and safety of students in the residential college, as well as for fostering and shaping the social, cultural, and educational life and character of the college. The dean serves as the chief academic and personal adviser to students in his or her residential college.
2. New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United Statesconsisting of the six states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. 3. Classics is the branch of the humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and culture of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially archaic Greece and republican Rome.
4. Traditionally, a chaplain is a minister, such as a priest, pastor, rabbi, imam or lay representative of a religious tradition, attached to a secular institution such as a hospital, prison, military unit, school, police department, university, or private chapel.
5. Pauperism (Latin pauper, ―poor‖) is a term meaning poverty or generally the state of being poor, but in English usage particularly the condition of being a \administered under the English Poor Laws. From this springs a more general sense, referring to all those who are supported at public expense, and still more generally, to all whose existence is dependent for any considerable period upon charitable assistance, whether this assistance be public or private. In this sense the word is to be distinguished from \
I. Read the text and answer the following questions.
1. What are the four kinds of pressure Zinsser describes for the 1970s? Are they the same kinds of pressure that trouble students today? Or have new ones taken their place?
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Learn about the text 《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
2. Some people believe that students perform best when subjected to pressure, others that they perform best when relatively free of pressure. How do you respond to pressure? How much pressure is enough? How much is too much?
3. Write an essay in which you compare your expectations of college pressures with the reality as you have experienced it to date.
II. Translate the following Chinese passage into English.
用两个字来形容我上学期的情况，那就是“糟糕”。下面我就来说说那些悲催事。开学初一直在努力适应崭新的校园生活。陌生的环境加上排得满满的课表，让我感到很不安，甚至想退缩。到了期末，所有的事情都赶在一块，压力很大。为准备考试经常熬夜，但还是挂了好几门，被别人落了一大截。我感觉一切都被自己搞砸了。幸亏我的朋友们一直安慰我、鼓励我。导师也找我谈了话，让我别灰心，慢慢来。我特别感谢他们的帮助。现在我觉得上学期所遭遇的挫折也是一种不错的经历，让我获益良多。它让我懂得了失败不是世界末日，失败使人成长成熟。 Unit 2
How to Live to Be A hundred
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For adults who remain vivaciously childlike in old age, there has to be a sustained enthusiasm
for some aspect of life. (1)____________________ If they are forcibly retired they should immerse themselves in some new, absorbing activity. 2
Some people are naturally more physically active than others, and are at a considerable
advantage providing their activities are not the result of stress. (2)____________________ The more earnest aging exercisers display a conscious or unconscious anxiety about their health. If they take exercise too seriously it will work against them. Older individuals who take up intensive athletic activity are usually people who fear declining health. Yet it is crucial that physical exercise—as we grow past the young sportsman stage—should be extensive rather than intensive, and above all, fun. 3
A calm temperament favours longevity. Those who are sharply aggressive, emotionally
explosive or naggingly anxious are at a grave disadvantage. (3)____________________ Relaxation does not contradict the idea of passionate interest. Indeed, zest for living, eagerness to pursue chosen subjects are vital in long life. 4
Thinking about ―the good old days‖, complaining about how the world is deteriorating,
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