背诵

作者：郭政禹

我有一个好同桌——朱博洋。个子不高，但他长着闪闪发光的眼睛，肉嘟嘟的小脸蛋，肥嘟嘟的手。看着他的手，如同一个肉球一般。但他有许多优点。

有一次，我是说让我们背诵课文。此时，我心一下子就沉重下来。我背诵能力一向不好，在以前我背一首古诗需要好几天才能背熟，现在才有点提升。我半点时间都不敢浪费，马上开始背诵。背诵，我先读了两遍，此时，令我吃惊的事情来了——他居然已经被过了老师说的内容。这让我感到不可思议，我吃惊地想：“我和他当了这么长时间的同桌，但从未知道他还有背诵这个特长。”我更加紧张了，加速背起来。

时间过去了十分钟，我终于背过了，但是不怎么熟，这是我听到他也在背——背的是倒数第二段，我听着，一会他把整篇课文背完了，这证明他已经背过了整篇课文。一会，老师开始检查了，他背得很快，但是一字不落。

我这位神奇的同桌，背诵能力真强。

考研中任何人作文写作都想拿满分，但是在有限的40天中，如何快速提升英语写作的分数呢?背诵范文就是一个很好的方法，通过朗读和背诵，考生能够迅速掌握并牢记各种精彩词汇、词组和句型，更能够大大增强英语语感。

而掌握语感是学会另一门语言的关键所在，也是一条捷径。另外，真题仿写可以大大提高我们的考场应变能力。

这里提醒考生，写作时牢记写作原则(以大作文为例)：基础比较好，以15分为目标的同学，在不犯错误的情况下尽可能追求复杂;基础比较薄弱，以及格分为目标的同学，以不犯错误为目的，尽可能追求简单。

在学生练习背诵达到一定程度时，为了进一步强化记忆，消除持续背诵造成的单调感、疲劳感，依据“寓教于乐”的原则，无妨采用以下方法来提高学生的背诵兴趣：①“对歌”式背诵法。即摹仿山区或某些兄弟民族“对歌”的方式，由甲、乙两个学生每人一句，轮流背诵;②“接力赛”式背诵法，即摹仿体育运动中接力赛跑的方式，由三个学生每人一句，上递下接，循环往复;③“叠罗汉”式背诵法，即摹仿杂技演员“叠罗汉”的方式由第一人背诵第一句，第二人接背二、三句，以下依次每人递增一句，连续不断，直到背完为止。以上方法不但趣味性强，而且参与面广，并能增强学生的群体意识，不妨一试。

理解是记忆的前提和基础。分层背诵法，就是先理解背诵部分的总的意思，然后把它分为几个层次，归纳概括出每层的意思，了解层与层之间的内在联系，把思路理清，将各层的意思连贯起来，在此基础上，再反复诵读几遍，就能较快地背诵下来。这种方法适合于背诵段落或篇幅不长的课文。比如《为学》这篇课文，首先要注意理清思路，划分层次，找出联系。全文可分三大段。第一自然段为第一大段，提出全文的观点：人求学确实有难易之别，但只要努力去学，就能变难为易。要记住这一段，一是要理清它的主要观点，二是要理清由一般事物到具体事物的推理过程，三是要抓住对照的写作特点。第二至第六自然段为第二大段，是用“僧之南海”的事例证明上述观点。第二自然段头一句是第一层，交待地点、人物;第六自然段是第三层，交待结果;中间贫富二僧的两次对话是第二层。最后一自然段为第三大段，总结全文，勉励晚辈应向贫僧学习，树立远大的志向，并为之而努力奋斗。前一句承上文而引出后一句;后一句顺着上文而来反问点明题旨。经过这样梳理一番，再反复读几遍，就很容易背诵了。

下面的材料旨在丰富学生在是非问题写作方面的思想和语言，考生在复习时可以先分类阅读这些篇章，然后尝试写相关方面的作文题。

对于素材中用黑体字的部分，特别建议你熟读，背诵，因为它们在语言和观点上都值得吸收。学习语言的人应该明白，表达能力和思想深度都靠日积月累，潜移默化。从某种意义上说，提高英语写作能力无捷径可走，你必须大段背诵英语文章才能逐渐形成语感和用英语进行表达的能力。这一关，没有任何人能代替你过。

因此，建议你下点苦功夫，把背单词的精神拿出来背诵文章。何况，并不是要求你背了之后永远牢记在心：你可以这个星期背，下个星期忘。这没有关系，相信你的大脑具有神奇的能力。背了工具箱里的文章后，你会惊讶的发现：I can think in English now！

1.?????? Proverbs

1. A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that individuality is the key to success.

2. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time.

3. Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

4. The classroom--not the trench--is the frontier of freedom now and forevermore.

5. Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

6. It is the purpose of education to help us become autonomous, creative, inquiring people who have the will and intelligence to create our own destiny.

7. You see, real ongoing, lifelong education doesn’t answer questions; it provokes them.

8. People will pay more to be entertained than educated.

9.the most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure.

10. The essence of our efforts to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each as equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind, and spirit he or she possesses.

11. A great teacher never strives to explain his vision-he simply invites you to stand beside him and see for yourself.

12. If you can read and don’, you are an illiterate by choice.

2. Damaging Research

A study by National Parent-Teacher Organization revealed that in the average American school, eighteen negatives are identified for every positive that is pointed out. The Wisconsin study revealed that when children enter the first grade, 80 percent of them feel pretty good themselves, but by the time they get to the sixth grade, only 10 percent of them have good self-images.

3. Education and Citizenship

An important aspect of education in the United States is the relationship between education and citizenship. Throughout its history this nation has emphasized public education as a means of transmitting democratic values, creating equality of opportunity, and preparing new generations of citizens to function in society. In addition, the schools have been expected to help shape society itself. During the 1950s, for example, efforts to combat racial segregation focused on the schools. Later, when the Soviet Union launched the first orbiting satellite, American schools and colleges came under intense pressure and were offered many incentives to improve their science and mathematics programs so that the nations would not fall behind the Soviet Union in scientific and technological capabilities.

Education is often viewed as a tool for solving social problems, especially social inequality. The schools, t is thought, can transform young people from vastly different backgrounds into competent, upwardly mobile adults. Yet these goals seem almost impossible to attain. In recent years, in fact, public education has been at the center of numerous controversies arising from the gap between the ideal and the reality. Part of the problem is that different groups in society have different have different expectations. Some feel that children should be taught basic job-related skills; still others believe education should not only prepare children to compete in society but also help them maintain their cultural identity (and, in the case of Hispanic children, their language). On the other hand, policymakers concerned with education emphasize the need to increase the level of student achievement and to improve parents in their children’s education.

Some reformers and critics have called attention to the need to link formal schooling with programs designed to address social problems. Sociologist Charles Moscos, for example, is a leader in the movement to expand programs like the Peace Corps, Vista, and Outward Bound into a system of voluntary national service. National service, as Moscos defines it, would entail “the full-time undertaking of public duties by young people whether as citizen soldiers or civilian servers-who are paid subsistence wages” and serve for at least one year. In return for this period of service, the volunteers would receive assistance in paying for college or other educational expenses.

Advocates of national service and school-to-work programs believe that education does not have to be confined to formal schooling. In devising strategies to provide opportunities for young people to serve their society, they emphasize the educational value of citizenship experiences gained outside the classroom. At this writing there is little indication that national service will become a new educational institution in the United States, although the concept is steadily gaining support among educators and social critics.

4. The Teacher’s Role

Given the undeniable importance of classroom experience, sociologists have done a considerable amount of research on what goes on in the classroom. Often they start from the premise that, along with the influence of peers, students’ experiences in the classroom are of central importance to their later development. One study examined the impact of a single first-grade teacher on her students’ subsequent adult status. The surprising results of this study have important implications. It is evident that good teachers can make a big difference in children’s lives, a fact that gives increased urgency to the need to improve the quality of primary-school teaching. The reforms carried out by educational leaders like James Comer suggest that when good teaching is combined with high levels of parental involvement the results can be even more dramatic.

Because the role of the teacher is to change the learner in some way, the teacher-student relationship is an important part of education. Sociologists have pointed out that this relationship is asymmetrical or unbalanced, with the teacher being in a position of authority and the student having little choice but to passively absorb the information provided by the teacher. In other words, in conventional classrooms there is little opportunity for the students to become actively involved in the learning process. On the other hand, students often develop strategies for undercutting the teacher’s authority: mentally withdrawing, interrupting, and the like. Hence, much current research assumes that students and teachers influence each other instead of assuming that the influence is always in a single direction.

5. Education Philosophy

For the past fifty years our schools have operated on the theories of John Dewey (1859-1953), an American educator and writer. Dewey believed hat the school’s job was to enhance the natural development of the growing child, rather than to pour information, for which the child had no context, into him or her. In the Dewey system, the child becomes the active agent in his own education, rather than a passive receptacle for facts.

Consequently, American schools are very enthusiastic about teaching “life skills” –logical thinking, analysis, creative problem--solving. The actual content of the lessons is secondary to the process, which is supposed to train the child to be able to handle whatever life may present, including all the unknowns of the future. Students and teachers both regard pure memorization as an uncreative and somewhat vulgar.

In addition to “life skills”, schools are assigned to solve the ever growing stoke of social problems. Racism, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug use, reckless driving, and are just a few of the modern problems that have appeared on the school curriculum.

This all contributes to a high degree of social awareness in American youngsters.

6. Student Life

To the students, the most notable difference between elementary school and the higher levels is that in junior high they start “changing classes”. This means that rather than spending the day in one classroom, they switch classrooms to meet their different teachers. This gives them three or four minutes between classes in the hallways, where a great deal of the important social action of high school traditionally takes place. Students have lockers in these hallways, around which thy congregate.

Society in general does not take the business of studying very seriously. Schoolchildren have a great deal of free time, which they are encouraged to fill with extracurricular activities—sports, clubs, cheerleading, scouts—supposed to inculcate such qualities as leadership, sportsmanship, ability to organize, etc. those who don’t become engaged in such activities or have afterschool jobs have plenty of opportunity to “hang out”, listen to teenager music, and watch television.

Compared to other nations, American students do not have much homework. Studies also show that American parents have lower expectations for their children’s success in school than other nationalities do. (Historically, there has not been much correlation between American school success and success in later life.) “He’s just not a scholar”, the American parents might say, content that their son is on the swim team and doesn’t take drugs. (Some of the young do choose to study hard, for reason of their own, such as determining that the road to riches lies through Harvard Business School.)

What American schools do effectively teach is the competitive method. In innumerable ways children are pitted against each other—whether in classroom discussion, spelling bees, reading groups, or tests. Every classroom is expected to produce a scattering of A’s and F’s (teachers often grade A=excellent; B=good; C=average; D=poor; and F=failed). A teacher who gives all A’s looks too soft—so students are aware that they are competing for the limited number of top marks.

Foreign students sometimes don’t understand that copying from other people’s papers or from books is considered wrong and taken seriously. Here, it is important to show that you have done your own work and are displaying your own knowledge. It is more important than helping your friends to pass, whom we think do not deserve to pass unless they can provide their own answers. Group effort goes against the competitive grain, and American students do not study together as many Asians do. Many Asians in this country consider their group study habits a large contributor to their school success.

7. Adult Education

After complaining about many aspects of American life, a 40-year-old woman from Hong Kong concluded, “But where else could someone my age go back to school and get a degree in social work? Here you can change your whole life, start a new business, do what you really want to do.”

So at least to this person, school requirements weren’t inhibiting. And to millions of others, adult education is the path to a new career, or if not to a new career, to a new outlook. Schools generally encourage the older person who wants to start anew, and besides regular classes, schedule evening classes in special programs. Today there are so many people of retirement age in college that it is no longer remarkable.

8. Moral Relativism in American

Improving American education requires not doing new things but doing (and remembering) some good old things. At the time of our nation’s founding, Thomas Jefferson listed the requirements for a sound education in the Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia. In this landmark statement on American education, Jefferson wrote of the importance of education and writing, and of reading history, and geography. But he also emphasized the need “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties, as men and citizens.” Jefferson believed education should aim at the improvement of both one’s “morals” and “faculties”. That has been the dominant view of the aims of American education for over two centuries. But a number of changes, most of them unsound, have diverted schools from these great pursuits. And the story of the loss of the school’s original moral mission explains a great deal.

Starting in the early seventies, “values clarification” programs started turning up in schools all over America. According to this philosophy, the schools were not to take part in their time-honored task of transmitting sound moral values; rather, they were to allow the child to “clarify” his own values (which adults, including parents, had no “rights” to criticize). The “values clarification” movement didn’t clarify values; it clarified wants and desires. This form of moral relativism said, in effect, that no set of values was right or wrong; everybody had an equal right to his own values; and all values were subjective, relative, and personal. This destructive view took hold with a vengeance.

In 1985 The York Times published an article quoting New York area educators, in slavish devotion to this new view, proclaiming, “They deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong.” The article told of one counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors. In the course of that session a student concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return one thousand dollars she found in a purse at school. According to the article, when the youngsters asked the counselor’s opinion, “He told them he believed the girl had done the right thing, but that, of course, he would not try to force his values on them. ‘If I come from the position of what is wrong,’ he explained, ‘then I’m not their counselor.’”

Once upon a time, a counselor offered counselor, and he knew that an adult does not form character in the young by taking a stance of neutrality toward questions of right and wrong or by merely offering “choices” or “options”.

In response to the belief that adults and educators should teach children sound morals, one can expect from some quarters indignant objections (I’ve heard one version of it expressed countless times over the years): “Who are you to say what’s important?” or “Whose standards and judgments do we use?”

The correct response, it seems to me, is, is we ready to do away with standards and judgments? Is anyone going to argue seriously that a life of cheating and swindling is as worthy as a life of honest, hard work? Is anyone (with the exception of some literature professors at our elite universities) going to argue seriously the intellectual corollary, that a Marvel comic book is as good as Macbeth? Unless we are willing to embrace some pretty silly position, we’ve got to admit the need for moral and intellectual standards. The problem is that some people tend to regard anyone who would pronounce a definitive judgment as an unsophisticated Philistine or a closed-minded “elitist” trying to impose his view on everybody else.

The truth of the real world is that without standards and judgments, there can be no progress. Unless we are prepared to say irrational things—that nothing can be proven more valuable than anything else or that everything is equally worthless—we must ask the normative question. It may come, as a surprise to those who fell that to be “progressive” is to be value-neutral. But as Matthew Amold said, “the world is forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best things” and if the world can’t decide what the best things are, at least to some degree, then it follows that progress, and character, is in trouble. We shouldn’t be reluctant to declare that some things, some lives, books, ideas, and values are better than others. It is the responsibility of the schools to teach these better things.

At one time, we weren’t so reluctant to teach them. In the mid-nineteenth century, a diverse, widespread group of crusaders began to work for the public support of what was then called the “common school”, the forerunner of the public school. They were to be charged with the mission of school felt that the nation could fulfill its destiny only if every new generation was taught these values together in a common institution.

The leaders of the common school movement were mainly citizens who were prominent in their communities—businessmen, ministers, local civic and government officials. These people saw the schools as upholders of standards of individual morality and small incubators of civic and personal virtue; the founders of the public schools had faith that public education could teach good moral and civic character from a common ground of American values.

But in the past quarter century or so, some of the so-called experts became experts of value neutrality, and moral education was increasingly left in their hands. The commonsense view of parents and the publicthat schools should reinforce rather than undermine the values of home, family, and country, was increasingly rejected.

There are those today still that claim we are now too diverse a nation, that we consist of too many competing convictions and interests to instill common values. They are wrong. Of course we are a diverse people. We have always been a diverse people. And as Madison wrote in FederalistNo.10, the competing, balancing interests of a diverse people can help ensure the survival of liberty. But there are values that all American citizens share and that we should want all American students to know and to make their own: honesty, fairness, self-discipline, fidelity to task, friends, and family, personal responsibility, love of country, and belief in the principles of liberty, equality, and the freedom to practice one’s faith. The explicit teaching of these values is the legacy of the common schools, and it is a legacy to which we must return.

9. Schools Should Teach Values

People often said, “Yes, we should teach these values, but how do we teach them?” this question deserves a candid response, one that isn’t given often enough. It is by exposing our children to good character and inviting its imitation that we will transmit to them a moral foundation. This happens when teachers and principals, by their words and actions, embody sound convictions. As Oxford’s Mary Warnock has written, “You cannot teach morality without being committed to morality yourself; and you cannot be committed to morality yourself without holding that some things are right and others wrong.” The theologian Martin Buber wrote that the educator is distinguished from all other influences “by his will to take part in the stamping of character and by his consciousness that he represents in the eyes of the growing person a certain selection of what is, the selection of what is ‘right’, of what should be.” It is in this will, Buber says, in this clear standing for something, that the “vocation as an educator finds its fundamental expression.”

There is no escaping the fact that young people need as example principals and teachers who know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and who themselves exemplify high moral purpose.

As Education Secretary, I visited a class at Waterbury Elementary School in Waterbury, Vermont, and asked the students, “Is this a good school?” They answered, “Yes, this is a good school.” I asked them, “Why?” Among other things, one eight-year-old said, “The principal Mr. Riegel, makes good rules and everybody obeys them.” So I said, “Give me an example.” And another answered, “You can’t climb on the pipes in the bathroom. We don’t climb on the pipes and the principal doesn’t either.”

This example is probably too simple to please a lot of people who want to make the topic of moral education difficult, but there is something profound in the answer of those children, something education should pay more attention to. You can’t expect children to take messages about rules or morality seriously unless they see adults taking those rules seriously in their day-to-day affairs. Certain must be said, certain limits lay down, and certain examples set. There is no other way.

We should also do a better job at curriculum selection. The research shows that most “values education” exercises and separate courses in “moral reasoning” tend not to affect children’s behavior; if anything, they may leave children morally adrift. Where to turn? I believe our literature and our history are a rich quarry of moral literacy. We should mine that quarry. Children should have at their disposal a stock of examples illustrating what we believe to be right and wrong, good and bad—examples illustrating what are morally right and wrong can indeed be known and that there is a difference.

What kind of stories, historical events, and famous lives am I talking about? If we want our children to know about honesty, we should teach them about Abe Lincoln walking three miles to return six cents and conversely, about Aesop’s shepherd boy who cried wolf if we want them to know about courage, we should teach them about Joan of Arc, Horatius at the bridge, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. If we want them to know about persistence in the face of adversity, they should know about the voyages of Columbus and the character of Washington during the Civil War. And our youngest should be told about the Little Engine That Could. If we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: “No, I must submit to the decree of Athens.” If we want our children to respect the rights of others, they should read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’ “Letter from Birmingham jail.” From the Bible they should know about Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Jonathan’s friendship with David, the Good Samaritan’s kindness toward a stranger, and David’s cleverness and courage in facing Goliath.

These are only a few of the hundreds of examples we can call on. And we need not get into issues like nuclear war, abortion, creationism, or euthanasia. This may come as a disappointment to some people, but the fact is that the formation of character in young people is educationally a task different from, and prior to, the discussion of the great, difficult controversies of the day. First things come first. We should teach values the same way we teach other things: one step at a time. We should not use the fact that there are many difficult and controversial moral questions as an argument against basic instruction in the subject.

After all, we do not argue against teaching physics because laser physics is difficult, against teaching American history because there are heated disputes about the Founders’ intent. Every field has its complexities and its controversies. And every field has its basics, its fundamentals. So they are too with forming character and achieving moral literacy. As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task. But it is a crucial task, because we want our children to be healthy, happy, and successful but decent, strong, and good. None of this happens automatically; there is no genetic transmission of virtue. It takes the conscious, committed efforts of adults. It takes careful attention.

10. College Pressures

Mainly I try to remind that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don not want to hear such liberating news. They want a map—right now – that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.

What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

My wish, of course, is na?ve. One of the national gods venerated in our media—the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive—and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.

I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, and the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains: only victims.

“In the late 1960s.” one dean told me. “The typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world’ or ‘how I can make a contribution?’ Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?’” many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said: “They are trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.”

Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale’s official system of grading, A means “excellent” and B means “very good.” Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.

It’s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it’s nice to think that admission officers are ready reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As that they regard a B as positively shameful.

The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the “gentleman’s C.” when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses-music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religion—that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I do not know if they are getting As or Cs, and I do not care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They cannot.

Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now come to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what college receives in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now, the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health-premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in American the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debt.

Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at college and full time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he,” incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society has not yet caught up with this fact.

Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.

I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know tem in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

“Do you want to medical school?” I asked them.

“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”

“Then why are you going?”

“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They are paying all this money and …”

Poor students, poor parents, they are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean will; they are trying to steer their sons and draughts toward a secure future. But the sons and daughter want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward specific profession—courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heard it put, “pre-rich.”

But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obliged to 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.

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-round 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 it—and she deserves to follow her muse.

Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.

“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 could not tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”

The story is almost funny—except that it is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressure 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 clacking 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?”

Probably they won’t. They will get blocked. They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out.

Part of the problem is that they are expected to do. A professor will assign five page papers. Several students will start writing ten page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.

“Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,” one dean points out, “It’s 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 work, psychologically.”

Why cannot 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 does not know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He did not sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. That’s what deans, masters, chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.

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 pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students do not have as much time to spend. They are also overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their figure nails 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.

Ultimately it will be the students’ 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 into themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.

“Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Hortas. “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.”

“They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”

I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is 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 usually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.

Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extracurricular 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.

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 ‘60s 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.

They also cannot afford to be the willing slave of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one-hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper—who’s 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 students will 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.

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.

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 neither them that change 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 products, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.

I asked 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.

11. To Err Is Wrong

In the summer of 1979, Boston Red Sox first baseman Carl Yastrzemski became the fifteenth player in baseball history to reach the three thousand hit plateaus. This event drew a lot of media attention, and for about a week prior to the attainment of this goal, hundreds of reports covered Yaz’s every more. Finally, one reporter asked, “Hey Yaz, aren’t you afraid all of this attention will go to your head?” Yastrzemski replied, “I look at this way: in my career I’ve been up to bat over ten thousand times. That means I’ve been unsuccessful at the plate over seven thousand times. That fact alone keeps me from getting a swollen head.”?

Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both products of the same process. As Yaz suggest, an activity that produces a hit may also produce a miss. It is the same with creative thinking; the same energy that generates good creative ideas also produces errors.

Many people, however, are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on “the right answer” belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B~”

Right over 70% of the time = “C~” Right over 60% of the time = “D~” Less than 60% correct, you fail.

From this we learn to be right as often as possible and to keep our mistakes to a minimum. We learn, in other words, that “to err is wrong.

Playing It Safe

With this kind of attitude, you aren’t going to be taking too many chances. If you learn that failing even a litter penalizes you (e.g., being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a “B” performance), you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself to situation where you might fall. This leads to conservative thought pattern designed to avoid the stigma our society puts on “failure”.

I have a friend who recently graduated from college with a Master’s degree in Journalism. For the last six month, she has been trying to find a job, but to no avail. I talked with her about situation, and realized that her problem is that she doesn’t know how to fail. She went through eighteen years of schooling to try any approaches where she might fail. She has been conditioned to believe that failure is bad in and of itself, rather than a potential stepping-stone to new ideas.

Look around. How many middle managers, housewives, administrators, teachers, and other people do you see who are to try anything new because of this failure? Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from many learning experience except for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.

Different Logic

From a practical point of view, “to err is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the everyday world requires us to perform thousand of small tasks without failure. Think about it: you wouldn’t last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand a pot of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very long.

Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you are more concerned with producing right answers than generating original ideas, you’ll probably make uncritical use of the rules, formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend litter time testing assumptions, challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phase errors are viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, “if you want the hits, be prepared for the misses.” That’s the way the game of life goes.

Errors as Stepping Stones

Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screw up, what went wrong this time?” the creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our thinking?” and then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. As a matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filed with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping-stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions that were right for the wrong reasons. And, Thomas Edison knew 1800 ways not to build a light bulb.

The following story about the automotive genius Charles Kettering exemplifies the spirit of working through erroneous assumptions to good ideas. In 1912, when the automobile industry was just beginning to grow, Kettering was interested in improving gasoline engine efficiency. The problem he faced was“knockthe phenomenon in which gasoline takes too long to burn in the cylinder-thereby reducing efficiency.

Kettering began searching for ways to eliminate the “knock.” He thought to him, “How can I get the gasoline to combust in the cylinder at an earlier time?” the key concept here is “early”. Searching for analogous situations, he looked around for models of “things that happen early.” He thought of historical models, physical models, and biological models. Finally, he remembered a particular plant, the trailing arbutus, which “happens early,” i.e., it blooms in the snow (“earlier” than other plants). One of this plant’s chief characteristics is its’ red leaves, which help the plant retain light at certain wavelengths. Kettering figured that it must be the red color, which made the trailing arbutus bloom earlier.

Now came the critical step in Kettering’s chain of thought. He asked himself, “How can I make the gasoline red?” perhaps I’ll put red dye in the gasoline—maybe that’ll make it combust earlier.” He looked around his workshop, and found that he didn’t have any red dye. But he did happen to have some iodine—perhaps that would do. He added the iodine to the gasoline and, lo and behold, the engine didn’t “knock”.

[英语作文写作的需要背诵的部分

1、阅读经典文学作品

让自己爱上文学，做一个追求文学和艺术素养的求学者。大部分学习编导的同学的文学素养还是比较高的，底蕴不错。

在这个基础上尽量多看一些包含基础知识的书，假如没有时间，最起码语文课本里面需要背诵的古诗词要会背，名家的经典散文要会背，还有中外知名的作家的作品要阅读和了解，潜移默化的掌握这些作家的代表作品。

2、精读和泛读并行

编导生看文学名著，不仅仅为了应对文艺常识考试，老师问你这个问题：“你喜欢什么书，喜欢哪本名著？”如果你连一本名著都没有读过，就比较尴尬了。在看的过程中精读的文学名著不必贪多，最好选择知名度比较大的小说，最好是近代的，比如茅盾的、鲁迅的、张爱玲的等等。选择几本，把里面的故事、人物、主题全部弄清楚。然后再选择一些书进行泛读。大概了解书的内容就可以了，这些内容从网上就可以了解，建议把百度百科利用好。

3、多看经典的电影

老师经常会问到，知名导演的电影作品，有时候会给出电影作品名字，让你写出或者选择导演的名字。也有时候给出导演的名字，让你写出两三部代表作品。复杂一点的问题会考察你对电影故事内容的掌握，比如给出四个选项，这四个选项都是关于战争的电影，让你选出哪一部是关于越战题材的电影。

要应对这样的问题，就需要在平时看电影的过程中积累，而且亲身看电影的经历比从书上了解印象更深刻，更有利于记忆。经典电影包括历史评价高的、影响力大的、得过重要奖项的。

可以先把中国导演从第一代到第六代导演的代表作看看，再看一下豆瓣评分前100的电影，往年经常考的电影也要看看。

4、根据时间线索来记忆

文艺常识的考察无非就是时间、人物名字、作品名字、事件。想要系统的记忆，最好的办法是用时间这个线索把这些事件串联起来。

记忆的时候最好是按照历史事件的发展来记。中国古代文学史散文创作经历了先秦诸子散文和历史散文，汉朝《史记》和赋，唐朝“古文运动”和唐宋八大家，明朝“唐宋派”、“公安派”、“竞陵派”，清朝“桐城派”等的发展；诗词创作经历了先秦《诗经》和楚辞、汉乐府、魏晋南北朝“建安七子”和陶渊明、唐宋近体诗如“初唐四杰”、山水田园诗派、边塞诗派和以李白、杜甫为代表的浪漫主义、现实主义诗派、宋词豪放派和婉约派等的发展；小说创作经历了先秦神话、魏晋南北朝的志怪小说和轶事小说和谴责小说、唐传奇、宋话本、明拟话本《三言》、《两拍》、明清四大古典小说和谴责小说等的发展；戏曲创作则以元朝为其黄金时代，包括元杂剧和散曲两部分，散曲又包括小令和套数两种。 这样记忆是不是更简单了？

5、多查，互相印证，互为补充。

目前市面上关于文艺常识的书很多，但有些知识可能存在一些争议，比如世界第一部有声电影到底是哪一部？有学者说是美国华纳兄弟公司拍摄的《爵士歌王》，也有人说是1926年华纳公司拍摄的《唐璜》。学习编导的高中生没有时间去研究和查证世界电影历史中的事件，但可以多看几本包含电影知识的书，再决定哪一个作为背诵的固定答案。目前来看，文艺常识的书里面基本都赞成世界第一部电影是《爵士歌王》。

6、大声读出来

想要强化文艺常识知识点在大脑中的印象，就把它大声的读出来。先将整句话读几遍，然后把关键词单独的读几遍。读的时候，脑海中要根据它的意思来描绘它的画面。举个例子：奥地利的作曲家舒伯特被誉为“歌曲之王”。著名作品有《摇篮曲》、《小夜曲》。你先把这句话读出来，然后再重复“舒伯特”、“歌曲之王”、《摇篮曲》、《小夜曲》这四个关键词，在读的过程中在想象一下舒伯特在拉小提琴的，沉醉这优美的音乐当中。

7、用自由联想法复习学过的知识点

在等车之类的无聊时刻，复习文艺常识知识点也许是很好的消遣。可以靠周围事物来触发灵感发挥你的自由联想。

比如你在等车的时候，看到对面广场上有一个人坐在长椅上，手里拿着巧克力。通过这样画面你可以想象到《阿甘正传》这部电影，这部电影里面有很多关于战争的情节，然后你可以联想到美国的关于表现战争的优秀影片有《拯救大兵瑞恩》《战争之王》《拆弹部队》《辛德勒的名单》等，通过《辛德勒的名单》想到它的导演史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格，他通过这部电影获得奥斯卡最佳影片、最佳导演等奖项，想到奥斯卡颁奖，可以联想到重要知识点欧洲三大电影节是意大利的威尼斯国际电影节、法国的戛纳国际电影节和德国的柏林国际电影节。

当你身边没有书的时候、当你坐车旅行无聊的时候、当你在晚上躺在床上准备入睡的时候，联想起来吧。

8、累积常考知识点，整理制作成卡片

提高文艺常识的学习效率，同时又增加记忆量的有效方法之一是将常被问到的知识点、你总不记不住的知识点抄下来，制成卡片。

文艺常识记忆的方法有很多，各人的情况不同，但是，相信大家合理利用了上述小技巧能够事半功倍！

很多高中生过于相信一些写作论坛或者写作书上推荐的写作模板，并且将其运用到雅思考试中去，但是最后的分数却是差强人意。其实模板作为一种解读雅思写作思路的工具还是起到一定作用的，考生可以通过阅读写作模板来迅速了解雅思写作段落布局和层次。但是谈及考试时的运用，苏州朗阁的老师不敢苟同。多年第一线雅思写作培训过程中，凡是写作在7分以上的学生，几乎没有人是使用写作模板的。而且钟情于模版的学生一般的写作分数甚至连6分都不到。所以朗阁的老师不推荐同学大量背诵写作模板，理由很简单，写作是活的，模板是死的。

正确的方法是多写，写之前要对雅思的2部分写作结构有一定了解，词汇和句型要有一定积累，最好是能参加专业培训，遇到一些有经验的写作老师，在你考前助你一臂之力，这样一定可以取得理想的成绩。

背诵是提高写作的又一有效途径。要学好写作，首先要处理好语言输入与输出之间的关系。前者是后者的前提条件。如果头脑空空如也，就根本谈不上写出像模像样的文章。只有读过大量东西，并且有意识地将其中精彩部分储存于记忆之中，才能保证下笔流畅、文通字顺。因此，背诵对于写作极为重要。但背诵不是机械记忆，而是有选择地背诵，是有意义地记忆，因为机械背诵的结果要么是记忆很快就荡然无存、了无痕迹，要么是无法活学活用、付诸实践。背诵包括五个方面：重点词汇、常用套语、精彩句子、优秀段落、经典篇章。

人们的记忆有两种，一种是机械记忆，一种是理解记忆。小学和初中生理解能力差，主要是机械记忆。随着年龄的增长，理解能力逐渐增强，记忆力也由机械记忆转化为理解记忆。中小学生理解力较差，但头脑单一，精力充沛，记忆力强，正是在无忧无虑的大脑中大量储存信息的极好时光。这一阶段，不能要求学生什么都理解了以后再去记忆，还真的要来点死记硬背。苏步青教授曾经说，他小时候背涌《孟子》、《史记》等书，很多内容都不理解，但硬是背下来了。

随着背诵的增多和年龄的增长，所背内容都一一理解了。他今天深厚的文学功底，就是那时候由背诵打下的。事实上，一个人等到理解力强了，恐怕背诵的大好时光也就过去了。应当趁年纪小，精力旺盛，记忆力强时大量背诵。就像牛儿吃草一样，先抢着囫囵吃进去，到吃饱了以后，再卧下去慢慢反刍、咀嚼、消化、吸收。

古人说书读百遍，其义自见。理解了书义，也便受到了教育，提高了对事物的认识、分析、理解能力，对生活自然有了正确的观点、态度。朱熹在这方面论述很精辟。他说，读书之法，在循序而渐进，熟读而精思，使其言皆若出于我之口，其义皆若发于我之心。熟读精思，融会贯通，就成了后来读书的正确标准。

新的学期，老师要求每篇课文都要背诵，没背完的同学放学留下来背诵。我一听，急了：啊！又要背诵啊。我最讨厌背诵了。

可是，我又怕留下来，只好听老师的话把课文全部背完。

星期一，《观潮》学完后，老师就布置要回家把课文背完。回到家，我就先把其它作业做完，然后一心一意背课文。我先一句话一句话地背，然后再连起来一段一段地背，最后全文一起背。背完这一课，我一共用了三天的时间。

到星期四，我们又学了第二课——《雅鲁藏布大峡谷》。不出所料，老师马上布置我们背诵。星期四那天，我没有背完。然后老师又布置星期五必须回家背完。我星期五把作业做完，只剩下背的部分了。星期六早上，妈妈很早就叫我起床背书。我懒洋洋地坐到凳子上，趴在桌子上，不肯读书。妈妈叫我起来读书。我说：“我不想背书。”妈妈说：“我们比赛，看谁先背完。”听妈妈这么说，我来劲了，马上大声读课文，生怕输给妈妈。结果，我们一起背完了课文。

这周星期一，我们又学习了《鸟的天堂》这篇课文，老师同样要求背诵。课文实在太长了，我怎么也背不出来。妈妈鼓励我，只要多读多记，功夫到了自然能够背诵。听了妈妈的话，我就一遍又一遍地读，一句一句，一段一段地背。四天后，我终于能流利地背诵《鸟的天堂》了。我好高兴，一下子就觉得再没有课文能难倒我了。《鸟的天堂》那么长，我都背诵出来了！

通过这三次背诵，我以后再也不怕背诵了。

我喜欢读课文，但是不喜欢背诵课文。我总觉得背诵课文很难，就像挡路虎。

星期一早自习，老师让我们背完第二课《雅鲁藏布大峡谷》才下课。我们不服气，有的同学小声嘀咕，有的同学皱起了眉毛，有的嘟起了小嘴巴。

我二话不说，就拿起语文书读了起来：“邪鲁藏布……”黄老师走过窗外，听到了我们朗朗的书声，咧开嘴笑了。这时候，我已经把课文读了五遍。这下应该背得了吧。我边把书合上边说：“先背第一自然段再背第二自然段。”

“在号称世界屋脊……”背着背着，我突然停下来了。“哦，卡词了！”张誉笑着说。我的脸一下就变成了红彤彤的西红柿了。于是，我继续又读了十遍。读完后，我背了起来，接着传来了一阵欢呼声“耶”。我背完了，这个欢呼的人正是我。

星期二，老师又让我们背诵第三课《鸟的天堂》。我早就猜到要背这一课了，这一课真是太长了，我都要晕了。我一来到学校就拿起语文书在读，差不多读了二十遍才熟悉全文，但还是背不了。后来，我又读了十遍课文，然后把书放在桌子上，大声地背诵，没想到我居然流畅地背了出来。

只要背完一篇课文，我就觉得背课文太简单了。因为只要认真朗读就一定能背出流畅又好听的课文。

星期五，黄老师说让我们背课文。我不想背，也不会背，可又不能不背。一不背的话在学校里，黄老师就会抽人去背，每个同学都很有可能会被抽到，我也是一样的。如果抽到我，我却背不了，那黄老师可能就会生气了。

我带着这样忐忑的心思去了补习班。在补习班里，我一直读书，一直读书，整个补习班都是书声。有的捂住耳朵在背书，有的把书捂在胸前，口里念念有词，有的俯首默念，文字好像在捉弄我，我怎么也捉不住它。

我恨死这些字了。我咬牙切齿的，一个字，一个字地读，就像要把它们吃进去一样。终于，我把1、2、3段勉勉强强背完了。我又用同样的办法把4、5、6自然段背完了。

我只有第7自然段没背完以及一篇作文没完成的时候，妈妈来了。老师让我回去背完。我回去的时候想：原来背书不也不是那么难。

回到家，妈妈要我多读几遍，说有助于记忆，不然会很快就忘记的。我遵照妈妈说的话，把课文读得滚瓜烂熟。

之前我不喜欢背课文，现在我觉得，我很喜欢背课文了。

新学期已经开始两个星期了，我们的课文学到了第四课。黄老师要求我们每课都必须背诵。我一听，呀！糟了，怎么办，怎么办？心里急得像热锅上的蚂蚁。明天又该留校了！

星期一的晚上，我做完作业就开始读第一课《观潮》，反反复复读了很多遍，还是背不出来。转眼就到十点了，妈妈说：“你先洗澡睡觉吧，明天还要读书，早上自习时再接着背！”于是我怀着不安的心情睡了。

第二天早上，我一早来到学校，继续读课文。时间一转眼过去了，但我还是背不出来，放学的时候果不其然我被留下了，我很沮丧！

星期三的时候，我们学了《雅鲁藏布大峡谷》，又要背诵。第一课还没背完，又来第二课了。我垂头丧气地回到家里，妈妈也知道我们的课文都要求背诵，看到我的样子就知道是什么事情了。妈妈叫我先把要写的作业做完再说。

做完作业后，妈妈和我说：“琪琪，妈妈知道背书是你的弱项，你先不要想着马上能背出来，你一句一句记，一段一段背，不管结果怎么样，你都不能失去信心，你尽自己最大的努力，能背多少就背多少，妈妈不怪你！”

听了妈妈的话我没那么大的压力了，不管能不能背先反反复复读。

现在已经学到了第四课，虽然我都不能完全地背出来，但我不会灰心了，一有时间我就会读课文，总有一天我会背出来的。

新的一学期，我们步入四年级，学习的知识越来越多，同学们都投入到紧张的学习中。这学期老师要求我们每一篇课文都要背诵，但是课文都好长一篇呢，我觉得有点难。这不，今天的第三课《鸟的天堂》就把我难住了。

放学，老师布置我们背《鸟的天堂》和《词语盘点》。我先背《鸟的天堂》。这是一篇写的是鸟的天堂的景色，周围的环境，还有对鸟的天堂——榕树的描写，形容词好多。我读了几十遍也记不住，准备放弃。我想这是老师交代的家庭作业，必须完成，别的同学做得到，我也要做到！我调整了一下我的心情，先一段一段的背，然后再连在一起背。首先还是不熟练，于是我灵机一动，先去读《词语盘点》里词语。因为我发现《词语盘点》里的词语就是《鸟的天堂》里的词语，我读熟了词语，再把它们串起来，比如“宽阔的薄雾，竹竿有规律……

就这样，我一直这样读、背，我把多余的字在心中反复默念，不到一会儿，我就背完了。

背完《词语盘点》，再背《鸟的天堂》，我感觉轻松多了，很熟练的就背完了。

通过这次背诵课文，我懂得了做什么事都不能操之过急，要想办法，找诀窍，不要死记硬背，做一个善于动脑筋的聪明人！

新的学期，去学校上课的第一天，黄老师就要求我们这个学期每篇课文都背诵。

我们学的第一篇课文就是《观潮》。放学，老师给我们布置的作业就有一项背诵任务。回家后，我做完其它作业就开始读。一开始读了好多遍我都不会背。妈妈叫我先一个自然段一个自然段地背，会背了再一起背。我照着妈妈教我的方法一段一段背，背到好晚才背完，但还不是很熟练，只能算勉强。妈妈交代我第二天早自习去认真读，早上的记忆要比晚上好。果然，我读了几遍之后在我的同桌袁紫露那里背，顺利地过关了。

这一课，袁紫露没有我背得这么熟。她在我这里背的时候总要提醒几个字，所以我让她继续去读，只要用心去读，就一定能背下来。读了一会，她又到我这里来背，这一次可以说是背得滚瓜烂熟。

学完第一课又是第二课。第二课我们学的是《雅鲁藏布大峡谷》。第二天早自习，我跟袁紫露比赛背，看哪个先背完。她也认真地读起来。这一课我只读了一个早自习就背下来了，她却背了好几天，这一次我比赢了。

难怪妈妈经常跟我说，一天之计在于晨。早上读书背书是最好的时光。我觉得背诵是一件很好的事情，既可以学习知识，还可以训练记忆。我以后一定会更努力地背诵！

新学期到了，黄老师在讲台上严肃地说：“这学期的课文全部都要背诵。”

我坐在下面很苦恼：按照我这种记忆力，就是让我读一天我都背不下来呀！

星期二，我一进教室就看见黑板上写着：一五二班所有的人今天要早自习，必须背完第一课。看完黑板上的字后，我赶紧坐在座位上一心一意地读，可是我读了二十多遍还不能背一段。

好消息就在我苦闷的时候来了，黄老师进来说：“今天读书很认真，就只要你们读三四自然段，而且是在家里背。”我一听心里马上就乐开了花。

终于熬到放学回家了，我先做完了作业到了晚上才开始背书的。我跟妈妈说，我们只要背第一课的三四段。妈妈听了之后也没说什么，只是微微点下头让我认真背。背诵的过程中，我一会儿跟弟弟玩，一会儿出去看会儿电视，一会儿玩一下平衡车，可是我似乎忘记了什么东西，这时我才想起还没把课文背下来。可是已经到了睡觉时间，我只好去睡觉了。

到了星期三，我大约五点左右就起床背书了。那时我读得很认真，一句一句一段一段的，终于能背下来了，妈妈那时候出来揉揉眼睛连忙竖起大拇指表扬了我。

背诵课文真是件既让我头痛又让我感到开心的事。

一个星期二的下午，快放学了，语文老师布置了背诵第13课《小英雄雨来》3-7自然段的作业。

我们全班都快晕了，这么多个自然段，这要背到猴年马月才背得完，我们都在不停地抱怨。可是没办法，老师布置的作业我们必须完成，所以我心里就打了一个小算盘，我可以骗妈妈只用背3、4两个自然段。

回到家里，我很快就背完了3、4自然段，妈妈很是疑惑：“为什么只背这么少的自然段？”我振振有词：“老师就是这么要求的，不信你问郑邱昊！”妈妈信以为真，我也千叮咛万嘱咐妈妈一定只用签“已背诵”，不要签“已背诵3、4自然段”。我想想就很得意，很快就睡觉去了，妈妈签完字帮我把书装进了书包。

第二天早上，蒋老师开始检查背诵了。前两个自然段我倒背如流，可是后面三个自然段我要不总卡壳，要不就加字，要不就减字。蒋老师走到了我的面前，我流了一身冷汗，汗毛都竖起来了，心一直跳个不停，整个身子都僵硬了，生怕蒋老师看出来我没背。还好妈妈已经给我签字了，我又有些得意，妈妈签字就是证明啊！不好！这时我无意低头瞟了一眼签字，妈呀！妈妈签的居然是“已背诵3-4自然段”。糟了！蒋老师要向我走来了，如果让蒋老师看见我只背诵了3-4自然段她会大发雷霆，我紧张的全身冒汗，腿都在发抖。我还来不及把书本盖着，蒋老师就看见了签字。她勃然大怒，跑到讲台上把书狠狠地往桌子上一甩，大口喘着气，之后就没说什么了。

望着生气的蒋老师，我大气也不敢出，同学们的目光像利剑一样刺向我，我的心里难受极了。

蒋老师没有当众批评我，是想给我改过自新的机会。这件事也让我明白了学习要自觉，这样的人才会有出息。

张耀然

在人生的路途中，每个人都会遇到困难与挫折，但是只要是用心去思考，辛勤去付出，勇敢去面对，总会有解决困难的方法，一切挫折都会烟消云散。

平日里，我晚上在家学习写作业都会很长时间，基本上都是结束学习任务后就到了睡觉的时间，可有一次晚上，作业出奇的少，另外也没有其它的学习任务了，吃完晚饭我便一鼓作气在很短的时间完成了当天的作业，计划和弟弟好好的玩一次。收拾好书包，我像离弦的箭一样飞出书房，带着弟弟来到了我们的游乐天地——玩具房。也许幸福来得太突然，我心里一直有种不祥的预感，可能要有不好的事情要发生。果真，我们正在玩的不亦乐乎的时候，我们的英语老师给我妈妈联系，说要让我背诵一大段英语解说词。此时我真佩服我的直觉，真让我猜中了，今晚的欢乐玩耍要泡汤了。无奈，我就从玩具房出来重新回到了书房，准备背诵英语。看到老师发的短文，瞬间我就蒙圈了，这篇短文别说背诵了，有些单词我还不认识，这可是难上加难的任务啊，面对着这个困难，我脑子一片空白，着急的掉下了眼泪，感觉自己完不成这个任务。这时，妈妈走了过来，安慰我说：“老师把任务交给你说明相信你能完成，你如果觉得有困难，那么首先要冷静的想一想该如何去做，如何迈出解决困难的第一步。”听了妈妈的话后，我便开始调整自己的情绪，耐心的拿出英文词典，一个个查出不认识单词的读音的中文含义，然后在这些单词上标注了同音的中文。确实这个方法很有作用，这样既理解了短文的意思，也知道了陌生单词的读音，背诵起来易如反掌，和背诵一段汉语短文基本上没有区别，于是，我在很短的时间就熟练的背诵了下来，内心充满了无限的成就感。

通过这次背诵我明白了一个道理：困难也许只是心里的一种恐惧，但是只要自己内心勇敢了，困难并不是那么可怕，克服了心理上的困难，用心去思考问题，想出解决的方法，任何事情都会迎刃而解，因为“办法总比困难多”。我相信只要我坚持这个信念，我一定会勇敢的朝自己的梦想前进，我也一定会变得无比强大。

陈弈霖

这学期刚开学，才学完第一课《桂林山水》，黄老师就要求我们回家背诵《桂林山水》。而且今天的作业格外的多。

一回到家，我就开始做作业。不像平时要吃一会儿东西，或者要休息几分钟。才肯去做作业，我今天之所以这么积极，是因为昨天跟妈妈打了赌。今天要在六点钟前把作业做完，我把所有作业做完只剩下背诵课文了。

我拿起书读了起来，我用了之前的背书方法。先自己规定读几遍，如果还感觉不能够背的话，就再多读几遍。感觉很流畅了，再自己卧着书背。如果还有不能背的，就反复读那几个地方。

我读了几十遍还是不可以背的话就会使出杀手锏了，用爸爸教我的一句一句地读，一句一句地背。一段一段地背，背完所有自然段，再整篇课文一起背。这个办法虽然很笨，但是效果非常好。

第二天一早，我就可以在黄老师那里轻松的背完。我刚背完不久，黄老师就宣布今天要背第三课，我很生气，黄老师你还让不让人活啊，刚背第一课又要背第三课。回到家，我又用死记硬背大法，终于背完了。

我发现背书并不难，只要认真记就可以了。

李雨涵

每次只要听见背诵两个字，我的头就好像要爆炸一样。

因为每次我都是最后一个背完的。这让我很为难

记得我们上第三课的时候，黄老师让我们背诵，当时我的心情一下子跌到了谷底，心想：完了，完了，又要背诵，我肯定又背不出来，放学回家后，先做完其他作业，再读课文，读几遍之后，就到妈妈那里去背，结果吞吞吐吐，妈妈说：“不行不行，这样怎么能行呢？再去读一会”？然后我又接着读，大概十多分钟，我又去背，没想到还是不流畅，我就要妈妈提醒，妈妈说：“不能提醒，假如考试的时候这是一个填空题，你找谁提醒去，你读的时候要声音大点，边读边记，不是随随便便唱几下就可以了的，你心里不记的话，你读一晚上都不会有结果的，你可以一段一段的先读然后再背诵。”听了妈妈的话，我就又读起来了，我先读一段读了几遍之后，再去妈妈那里背诵，没想到一下子就背出来了。

按照妈妈说的方法，没用多久的时间，我就把第三课给被背诵出来了

后来我才发现其实有些课文看似非常难，但是背诵起来也没有想象的那么困难。