作者简介：Jamie Miller，他刚完成在Quinnipiac 大学第一年的客座助理教授工作, 他会在2014至2015年间在康奈尔大学做博士后研究员的工作。

In his first year on the job, a faculty member grapples with culture clash

在他第一年工作时，一个教师与文化冲突的斗争

“You only need to stay one week ahead of your students.”“You are always smarter than they are.”“You can definitely teach a book you haven’t read yet.”Such was the advice I received in the summer of 2013. The first year of teaching is daunting for anyone, no doubt, but for me there was an additional complicating factor: I was a foreign Ph.D. teaching at an American university.

“你只需要比你的学生超前一周就可以了。”“你永远比他们聪明。”“你绝对可以教一本你没有看过的书。”这些是我在2013年夏天得到的建议。第一年教书毫无疑问是一个令人畏惧的挑战，但对于我来说还要应对更复杂的一个因素：我是一个在美国大学教书的外国博士。

I did my undergraduate work at the University of Sydney, in Australia, and my master’s and doctorate at the University of Cambridge, in Britain. Much of the American university system, the expectations of students, and the basic classroom norms were going to be unfamiliar to me, I knew, providing an additional layer of challenges to an already imposing task.

我本科就读于澳大利亚的悉尼大学，我的研究生和博士则在英国的剑桥大学就读。美国大学的制度，学生的期望和基本的课堂规矩对我来说将会是非常陌生的，这也让本来就艰难的任务更加的困难。

And so it proved. The first semester in particular was ruthlessly demanding: Construct syllabus. Read. Write lecture plan. Create PowerPoint. Go over readings. Take notes. Give lecture. Conduct seminar. Repeat.

而事实确实如此。第一学期的教学特别的辛苦：制作讲义。读书。制定讲座计划。制作幻灯片。重新读书。做笔记。做讲座。组织研讨会。重复所有。

Research? What research? My “book manuscript” became almost as unfamiliar to me as some of the subjects I had to lecture on, like medieval Ethiopian Christianity and the Chinese revolution. Not quite “HS 202 From Plato to NATO,”but not far off, either: My job was to teach “Modern World History”and both parts of an Africa survey course. (This article is largely about the former, as few readers will ever have to teach the latter.)

至于科研？什么科研？我的手稿变得和许多我不得不传授的学科，比如什么中世纪埃塞俄比亚基督教和中国大革命一样陌生了。虽然没有像“从柏拉图到北大西洋公约组织”那么夸张，但也差不多了。我的工作是教“现代世界史”和一个非洲调查课程。（这篇文章大部分是讲前者的，因为很少有读者会被迫去教后者）

The biggest challenges I faced came from the students themselves. American students were not at all like those I had encountered in Australia and Britain. For a start, they had entirely different understandings of the relationship between student and professor. On the one hand, they were delightfully polite. “Professor Miller” struck me as both quaint and, surely, premature (I’m 28). They were also enthusiasm personified, with a voracious appetite for the unfamiliar ideas that I was presenting them with every day. It was never difficult to kick-start conversation in seminars; they all just had so many opinions.

我遇到的最大挑战来自学生本身。美国学生和我在澳大利亚和英国遇到的那些学生不同。首先，他们对学生和教授之间的关系有着完全不同的理解。一方面来讲，他们非常的礼貌。“米勒教授”让我觉得十分奇异并且早熟（我28岁）。他们也非常有热情，对我每天传授给他们的新的知识有着无限的渴望。研讨会从来不难开始；他们总是有很多可以讨论。

Yet for all their independent personalities, the students were often quite dependent as learners. Their first instinct upon encountering a problem was usually to lean on me. I lost count of the number of times students contacted me, often late at night, to ask questions to which the answers were clearly stated in the syllabus. One student emailed me at 3:12 a.m. to ask how many readings needed to be assessed in an essay question that began, “Compare two of the following.” All of this stood in stark contrast to my (hazy) memories of my undergraduate days. If I didn’t quite worship my professors, I definitely engaged in some light-to-medium veneration and was certainly keen to do anything to avoid their concluding that I wasn’t up to scratch.

但是虽然他们个性独立，这些学生在学习上却非常有依赖性。每当他们遇到了问题，他们的第一反应就是从我身上获得答案。我已经不记得有多少次学生在深夜联系我，来问我一些明明已经在大纲里写明的问题。一个学生一次在凌晨3:12分的时候发邮件问我一道大题需要分析几篇文章，而它的题目明确写着“比较以下两篇文章”。这些和我自己大学生活的记忆大不相同。就算我没有很崇拜我的教授们，我至少对他们有些许敬意，并且会避免任何让他们觉得我不够优秀的事。

My solution was largely a change in tone: Try to get the students to take more ownership of their learning and invest in themselves. I didn’t take attendance, and I gave them substantial leeway in choosing their essay and exam questions.

我的解决方法是让学生们更加独立的学习。我上课不点名，并且我给学生们充分的自由来选择他们的文章和考试问题。

I also realized that I needed to connect better with the students and get them to trust their strange-talking, weird-spelling professor.To that end, I conducted informal surveys early in the semester, which proved invaluable. The message from the students was consistent: I needed to talk more slowly, stop trying to put so much into each lecture. Less was more. I duly made the desired adjustments, which in turn earned a bit of good will that I could trade to get the students to do the things I really cared about (like explicitly anchor their seminar opinions in identifiable historical facts). Additionally, I encouraged them to actually come and see me during office hours—in practice rather than just in theory. After all, I was quickly realizing that those students whom I knew best, and on a more equal footing, were less likely to see me as a crutch and instead work harder to impress me. If that was a detour to their learning more, fine by me.

我同时也意识到我需要和学生们建立更好地联系，让他们来信任我这个说话奇怪，拼写诡异的教授。为此，我在学期刚开始的时候准备了调查问卷，但是无果而终。学生给我的建议非常的一致：我需要放慢语速和进度。讲得更少反而学到的更多。我尊重他们的意见进行了调整，这也带来了很好的回应：我的学生会更加愿意去做那些我在意的事情（比如说将他们的研讨会主题选择定为可确定的历史事实）除此之外，我鼓励他们真正地，更频繁地到办公室来找我— 赋予行动而不是只是说说。毕竟，我很快地发现那些更加了解我的学生会更加努力地学习来打动我，而非将我视作他们的拐杖。这是一个让他们学习更多的方法。

Other surprises were more vexing. The students’ writing skills fell far short of my expectations. Some had difficulty consistently writing coherent sentences, which in turn had a major impact on their ability to understand and express nuanced historical concepts. On the basis of my often tortuous grading experiences alone, there can be no obscuring the fact that the U.S. high-school system is passing the buck on the development of basic grammar, punctuation, and writing skills to higher education. One essay that I marked had more non-sentences in it than valid sentences. (I counted).

其他的意外则更为烦恼。学生的写作水平远远未达到我的预期。有些很难写出连贯的句子，导致了他们无法理解并表达许多历史概念的精妙之处。根据我自身痛苦的批改经历，美国的高中学生的基本语法，停顿和写作能力并不足以进入大学学习。一篇我批改的文章错误的句子比正确的更多。（我一句句数过来的）

I couldn’t help feeling that these shortcomings were just too deep-seated for me to make a serious dent in, but I tried anyhow. I cleared a week in the syllabus for a pair of classes: "How to Read Like a Historian" and "How to Write Like a Historian." I then assigned a small writing task (worth 10 percent of their grade) early in the semester, so I could give students extensive feedback on exactly what was expected in the major essay (30 percent of their grade).

我不禁觉得这些缺点是根深蒂固的，但是我还是努力去改变。我将大纲空出了一周专门来上一系列这样的课：“如何像一个历史学家一样阅读”和“如何像一个历史学家一样写作”。随后我在学期初布置了小小的写作任务（占他们成绩的百分之十），使我能够给学生足够的反馈来告诉他们主要的文章（百分之三十的成绩）会有哪些要求。

That early exercise also had one major side benefit: It made students feel more comfortable about what was expected of them for the final grade. American students care about grades. A lot. In my first semester, for instance, I conducted three quizzes on the lecture material, cumulatively worth only 10 percent. I thought the quizzes would help identify knowledge gaps as well as provide a concrete incentive to keep up with note taking for the final exam and, in Australian lingo, give a quick kick up the bum for slackers.

这个早期的联系还有一个额外的好处：它让学生们更加容易接受最终的成绩。美国学生在乎成绩。非常在乎。在我教第一学期的时候，比如说我会进行三个小测试，总共加起来只有百分之十的总体成绩。我觉得这些小测试能够查漏补缺并且能让他们有动力为期末考试学习，并且按照澳大利亚的话来说，给那些落后的学生一些警示。

The students, however, found it all overwhelming. Getting 4 out of 10 on a quiz made students very anxious indeed, which impaired learning. One student, close to tears, told—no, implored—me that if she didn’t get an A in this course, she wouldn’t get into law school. When I pointed out that this test carried limited weight and showed her exactly where she was falling short, thus helping her in the final exam, it made no difference to her.

然而学生们觉得这一切难以承受。在十分的小测试中拿了四分将让他们非常的焦虑，以至于影响他们之后的学习。有一个学生几乎哭着告诉我— 应该说乞求我如果她这门课不能拿A的话，她就不能去法学院了。当我指出这些考试所占比重很少，并且详细指出她薄弱的地方，帮助她更好地通过期末考试时，她依然没有得到安慰。

That reflected a fundamental difference in our experiences of education. Going to a big state university in Australia and paying around $5,000 a year in fees, I saw going to college as an extraordinary opportunity. In my mind, effort plus opportunity equaled a good education. I knew that this student was paying well over $50,000 a year, but in her eyes the equation was quite different: Money buys opportunity. To her, she’d already contributed the input, and now she expected the output. Warped as that was, I could see where she was coming from. If I’d committed to that much student debt, I’d be anxious that it translated directly into career prospects, too.

这反应出了我们教育经历根本的差别。每年花费5,000美金去上澳大利亚的一个州立大学对我来讲是一个极好的机会。在我心中，努力加上机遇就等于优质的教育。我知道这个美国学生每年需要交￥50，000的学费，但是在她眼中的等式则非常的不同：这些机遇是钱买来的。对她来说，她已经投入了很多，现在她期待着回报。虽然这个观念有些扭曲，我却可以理解。如果我背负了那么巨大的学生贷款，我也会急切地希望我能有一个稳定的职业。

In the second semester, I scrapped the quizzes entirely. They were just more trouble than they were worth.

在第二学期，我整个去除了小测试。他们造成的问题已经超过了他们的价值。

The final major difference from my experiences abroad was simply the way in which my students developed their worldviews. Growing up in Sydney, we did not rationally believe that Australia was the center of the world, but rather that it composed one small, quirky part of it.

最后一个我在国外感受到的差异是关于我的学生们是怎样建立世界观的。我在悉尼长大，我们从未觉得澳大利亚是世界的中心，而只是世界小小而奇特的一部分。

My students, however, tended to see things in a relentlessly America-centric fashion. It was a constant challenge in my “Modern World History” class to get students to stop referring to the United States as “we” and “us” and historical government policy as “ours.” (Once I observed this surprising tendency among my students, I noticed that American historians often did likewise in the books I read, especially when commenting on contemporary or recent history.) Students simply had no experience of taking themselves outside the shoes of Americans and viewing historical issues in which the nation was involved from a detached, third-party perspective.

我的学生则习惯性的以美国为中心的态度来看待世界。我总是很难阻止学生在我的“现代世界史课上”将美国成为“我们”并将历史性的政治策略称为“我们的”。（一旦我在我的学生中发现了这样的趋势，我很快地发现了美国的历史学家也经常在书中，特别是评论当代或近代历史的书中这样称呼）学生从没有将他们的美国人身份摒除，以一个局外人的角度来看待历史问题。

Relatedly, their knowledge of events, places, ideas, and people outside the United States was sometimes startlingly limited. Ho Chi Minh may as well have been the local Asian takeaway place. Some students seemed scarily unfamiliar with a world map.

相关的，他们对美国之外时间，地点，和人物的认知非常的有限。胡志明对他们来说就像美国当地的外卖店一样。许多学生对世界地图惊人地不熟悉。

More subtly, student essays often made value judgments that reflected a real inability to think of ideas like democracy, freedom, or race as malleable constructs, capable of different meanings across time and space. Instead those terms were straitjacketed with their American usage.Discussing ideas like social justice, communism, or class made me feel as if I were speaking another language. Students were able to identify the utility of myths to state-building in other countries, which was a prominent theme in the course. But hollow narratives of American triumphalism and exceptionalism simultaneously formed the very core of their understanding of their own country’s relationship to the rest of the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were quite unaware of how much ideology shaped their own worldviews, just as it did for the historical actors they were studying.

从更细微的角度来看，学生的文章们往往体现出他们缺乏对民主，自由，或是种族的可塑性随着时间和空间的变化的思考。他们只会在美国的背景下看待这些词汇。讨论像是社会正义，共产主义或是阶级这样的话题让我觉得我自己在说另外一种语言。学生能够辨认出神话在其他建设中国家的作用—这是这个课程的一大主题。但是空洞的、美国至上的陈述构成了他们对自己国家和世界其他地方关系的主要理解。他们经常会忽略他们的意识形态影响了他们的世界观，就和那些他们学习的那些历史学家一样。

None of that sat very easily with me. In a world-history course, it has to be a central goal to teach the students about, um, world history, and on its own terms. What to do?

这些使我非常的困扰。在一堂世界历史的课上，最主要的目标自然是学生学习真正的世界历史。我该怎么办呢？

In lectures, I used more maps and pictures to help students visualize events that were foreign in more ways than one. In our seminars, I emphasized talking specifically about overseas events rather than resorting to generalizations; I prioritized detail over analogy. And I stuck to my principles. Lectures on why militant Islam focused on the United States, and on what winning the Cold War really entailed and meant, might have raised uncomfortable questions for students, but if I didn’t force them to confront their preconceptions about how the world worked, then who in their lives would? In the event, I found that they loved being pushed to think in entirely new ways and engage with new horizons, which made me think more about the rigidities of my own thinking, too.

在讲座上，我更加经常地使用地图和图片来帮助学生们将对他们来说陌生的事件形象化。在我们的研讨会上，我强调海外的事件而不是一概而论；我视细节重于类比。并且我坚持自己的原则。关于为什么伊斯兰武装势力针对美国，赢得冷战有哪些实际的意义的讲座可能会让学生觉得不舒服，可是如果我不强迫他们去直视这个世界史怎样运作的，谁会去呢？在这个过程中，我惊异地发现他们其实非常喜欢被逼迫着用全新的方式去思考和看待问题，这让我觉得自己的思想其实也是固化的。

Looking back, it is clear I would never have gotten through it all without help. Colleagues were unstinting in sharing syllabi and helpful tips (they know who they are). Others put up with my falling asleep by 9 every night, leaving books all over the house—even the toilet acquired a substantial library—and generally looking worn out and crotchety six days out of seven.

回过头来看，很明显我一个人无法完成这些工作。我的同事们给了我许多有用的帮助（他们知道我在说谁）。其他的则忍受我每天九点钟睡觉，将书籍摊的到处都是—甚至厕所也变成了一个可观的图书馆—并且大部分看起来都破破烂烂的。

However, I noticed that even by the middle of the second semester, I actually felt like a better teacher. Like edits in an essay, the revised lectures were always more concise and focused, and updated PowerPoints were always better at illustrating the key elements (rather than just telling them). I began relying less on notes and walking around the class more. I found it easier to compartmentalize teaching and get other work done during the day.

然而我发现就算到了第二学期的中期，我真的觉得自己成为了一个更好地老师。就想修改过的文章一样，不断改进的讲座变得更加简洁和有重点了，并且升级过的幻灯片更加好的展示了重要的内容（而不是直白地告诉学生）。我愈来愈少地依靠笔记并且能更频繁地在课堂里行走。我发现我更加容易在白天完成教学和其他工作了。

The benefits of teaching for my research were also unmistakable. Teaching provided a never-ending flow of new ideas and pushed me to think in new directions about my dormant book project. It also forced me to read broadly (remember, a doctorate in Britain does not require third-year oral exams), which in turn reminded me why I love history so much.

教学对我的研究有着不可估量的好处。教学提供了永不中断的新鲜的观点，并且促使我去用新的方向来思考我沉睡的图书项目。它同时也使我更加广泛的阅读（英国的博士第三年不需要通过口语考试），从而让我想起我为什么那么喜欢历史。

文中生词：

Ethiopian: n.1. a native or inhabitant of Ethiopia; 2. of or relating to or characteristic of Ethiopia or its people or languages adj. 埃塞俄比亚的；黑人的
n. 埃塞俄比亚人；黑人

Voracious: adj.1. excessively greedy and grasping; 2. devouring or craving food in great quantities adj.贪婪的；贪吃的；狼吞虎咽的

Vexing: adj.1. extremely annoying or displeasing; 2. causing irritation or annoyance adj. 令人烦恼的v. （使）烦恼；（使）苦恼（vex的ing形式）

【智梦简介】

智梦是一家专注美国本科留学的教育咨询机构。

我们的使命：

“智梦教育团队深知留学申请关系到学生及其家长的前途和未来，我们将竭尽所能帮助每一位智梦学员发掘其潜在的特质，以开放透明的申请方式，让他们能不留遗憾的争取到自己的理想学校。与此同时，培养他们成为诚实守信、独立思考、德才兼备的国际化人才。”

我们的愿景：

“智梦教育将成为一所发掘学术兴趣，培养学术能力，塑造具有公民意识的新时代留学生的学校。”