现代大学英语第5册lesson 2 two kinds
Lesson 2 Two Kinds
“lilting”: A cheerful or lively manner of speaking, in which the pitch of the voice varies pleasantly
她似乎被这音乐吸引住了。这钢琴曲不长， 但有点狂乱，有着迷人的特点，乐曲一开 始是快节奏的，接着是欢快跳动的节拍， 然后又回到嬉戏的部分。
Para. 19 What did the girl see in the mirror? The true side prodigy side of me, a strong
character and an independent mind. What new thoughts did she have now? She had new thoughts which were filled
payments）
You could buy a house without any down payment, that is, completely on loan.
(Para. 4) We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy.
What were the warning signs?
Mother would think: If that Chinese girl could be a Shirley Temple-like prodigy, why not her own daughter?
Watching that girl’s performance, the mother had a new idea: to make her daughter learn the piano.
现代大学英语精读paraphrase和translation
Lesson Two: Two KindsParaphrase1.I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, trying each one on for size.I imagined myself as different types of prodigy, trying to find out which one suited me thebest.2.I had new thoughts, willful thou ghts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won’ts.I had new thoughts, which were filled with a strong spirit of disobedience and rebellion.3.The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple.The girl was Shirley Temple—like, slightly rude but in an amusing way.4.It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, asif this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.When I said those words, I felt that some very nasty thoughts had got out of my chest, and so T felt scared. But at the same time I felt good, relieved, because those nasty things had been suppressed in my heart for some time and they had got out at last.5.And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted to see it spill over.I could feel that her anger had reached the point where her self—control would collapse, andI wanted to see what my mother would do when she lost complete control of herself.6.The lid to the piano was closed, shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.When the lid to the piano was closed, it shut out the dust and also put an end to my misery. Phrases1.With almost no money down 几乎用不着交首付，几乎可以全部用贷款来买房2.The raised hopes and failed expectations 那些过高的希望和达不到的期盼3.Shorting out 短路4.The showpiece of our living room 我们起居室里的一件摆设5.Stiff-lipped smile 尴尬不自然的笑容6.Frighteningly strong 惊人地强大7.Follow their own mind 我行我素Sentence1.Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz.我的头发没有做出我要的大卷花，而是给我弄成一头乱蓬蓬的黑色小卷毛。
现代大学英语2two kinds
Academic Challenge
1.
2.
Write a guide for parents, titled: “How to be a good parent” or “How to form good relationships with your kids.” Have at least 15 points on your guide. Explain the significance of the two pieces: “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented”.
Pre-reading Questions
What’s the meaning of the title “Two Kinds”? How is the story arranged? How many characters are there in the story?
Reading Strategy
IV. Organization of the Text
Part I. Beginning (Paras. 1-3): tells about the mother and her hopes for her daughter Part II. Development (P4-76): Subsection 1 (Paras. 4 – 11) the mother’s unsuccessful attempt to change her daughter into a Chinese Shirley Temple. Subsection 2 (Paras. 12 – 20) the mother was trying very hard to train her daughterto be genius.
现代大学英语第5册精读5LessonTwoTwoK幻灯片
will determine whether or not he/she gains his objective).
C. Conflict
Conflict is essential to plot. Without conflict there is no plot. It is the opposition of forces which ties one incident to another and makes the plot move. Conflict is not merely limited to open arguments, rather it is any form of opposition that faces the main character. Within a short story there may be only one central struggle, or there may be one dominant struggle with many minor ones.
the story “Two Kinds”
A. setting
B . plot
C. conflict D. Theme E. point of view F. Characters G. The Joy Luck Club and
Amy Tan
Lesson_2_Two_Kinds
Questions on the Content
5. Could the family afford piano lessons? How did the mother solve the problem?
Subsection 4 (Paras. 29-46)
How the girl was made to learn the piano under the instructions of Old Chong.
Lesson 2 Two Kinds
Amy Tan 谭恩美
Plot – the deliberately arranged sequence of interrelated events that constitute the basic narrative structure of a novel or a short story Theme – the general meaning, the central and dominating idea that unifies and controls the total work (The theme of a story is different from its plot. While the plot tells what happens in the story, the theme shows what the story is about)
Amy Tan
Amy Tan is one of the prominent Chinese American writers that have emerged since the 1980s.
She published her first novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989, which was an instant success. It was followed by other novels: The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and the Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001).
精读5第二版课文翻译
Book5 cataloguesLesson 1Who Are you and what are you doing here (1)Lesson 2 Two kinds (10)Lesson 3Goods move. People move. Ideas move. And cultures change (21)Lesson 4Professions foe women (29)Lesson 5Love is a fallacy (34)Lesson 6The way torainy mountain (47)Lesson 7Rewriting American history (53)Lesson 8 The Merely very good (73)Lesson 9 Al gore’s Nobel peace prize acceptance speech (82)Lesson10The Bluest Eye (89)Lesson 11HowNews becomes opinion off-limits (101)Lesson 12The Indispensable opposition (105)Lesson 1 Who Are you and what are you doing hereWelcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. We’ve go t guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: W/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlork hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean som ething a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occa/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlsionally even to piss off some admirable people.I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there. This I began to develop because of my father, who had never been tocollege—in fact, he’d barely gotten out of high school. One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life. Iwas about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory. “I think I might want to be pre-law,” I told my father. I had no idea what being pre-law was. My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragon-lik e, from his magnificent nose. “Do you want to be a lawyer?” he asked. My father had some experience with lawyers, and with policemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either. “I’m not really sure,” I toldh/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlim, “but lawyers make pretty good money, right?”My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog./b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html “How about the science requirements?”“Take ’em later,” he said, “you never know.”My father, Wright AukenheadEdmundson, Malden High School Class of 1948 (by a hair), knew the score. What he told me that evening at the Clewley Road kitchen table was true in itself, and it also contains the germ of an idea about what a university education should be. But apparently almost everyone else—students, teachers, and trustees and parents—sees the matter much differently. They have it wrong.Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. For students, that end is a good job. Students want the credentials that will help them get ahead. They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school. And how can we blame them? /b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlAmerica values power and money, big players with big bucks. When we raise our children, we tell them in multiple ways that what we want most forthem is success—material success. To be poor in America is to be a failure—it’s to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity. Then there are those back-breaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one. Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the futureand/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.The faculty, too, is often absent: Their real lives are also elsewhere. Like most of their students, they aim to get on. The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work. No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching. The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ scholarly publications. The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors’ work as being silly or beside the point. Some of it is. But the public also senses that bec ause professors don’t pay full-bore attention to teaching they don’t have to work very hard—they’ve created /b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmla massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.This is radically false. Ambitious professors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonethelesslabor-intense. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that refereed journal. These essays are honest: Their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost nopractical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.The students and the profes/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlsors have made a deal: Neither of them has to throw himself heart and soul into what happens in the classroom. The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectual—and often genuinely smart. For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, and often are. Whatever the case, no one wants to invest too much in them—for life is elsewhere. The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.No one in this picture is evil; no one is criminally irresponsible. It’s just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.As for the admin/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlistrators, their relation to the students often seems based not on love but fear. Administrators fear bad publicity, scandal, and dissatisfaction on the part of their customers. More than anything else, though, they fear lawsuits. Throwing a student out of college, for this or that piece of bad behavior, is very difficult, almost impossible.The student will sue your eyes out. One kid I knew (and rather liked) threatened on his blog to mince his dear and esteemed professor (me) with a samurai sword for the crime of having taught a boring class. (The class was a little boring—I had a damned cold—but the punishment seemed a bit severe.) The dean of students laughed lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation. I was, you might say, discomfited, and showed up to class for a while with my cellphone jiggered to dial 911 with one touch.Still, this was small potatoes. Co/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmllleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple. Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.You’ll find that cheating is common as well. As far as I can discern, the student ethos goes like this: If the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year,it’s okay to go ahead a nd take advantage—you’ve both got better things to do. The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them. Fraternity files bulge with old tests from a variety of courses.Periodically the public gets exercised about this situation, and there are articles in the national news. But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.On/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmle of the reasons professors sometimes look the other way when they sense cheating is that it sends them into a world of sorrow. A friend of mine had the temerity to detect cheating on the part of a kid who was the nephew of a well-placed official in an Arab government complexly aligned with the U.S. Black limousines pulled up in front of his office and disgorged decorously suited negotiators. Did my pal fold? Nope, he’s not the type. But he did not enjoy the process.What colleges generally want are well-rounded students, civic leaders, people who know what the system demands, how to keep matters light, not push too hard for an education or anything else; people who get their credentials and leave the professors alone to do their brilliant work, so they may rise and enhance the rankings of the university. Such students leave and become donors and so, in their own turn, contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing.T/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlhey’ve done a fine job skating on surfaces in high school—the best way to get an across-the-board outstanding record—and now they’re on campus to cut a few more figure eights.In a culture where the major and determining values are monetary, what else could you do? How else would you live if not by getting all you can, succeeding all you can, making all you can?The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about. Not so. This view informed an address that Richard Brodhead gaveto the senior class at Yale before he departed to become president of Duke. Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his e ducational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields ofEto/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmln. Brodhead suggests that the content of the courses isn’t really what matters. In five years (or five months,or minutes), the student is likely to have forgotten how to do the problem sets and will only hazily recollect what happens in the ninth book of Paradise Lost. The legacy of their college years will be a legacy of difficulties overcome. When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, students will tap their old resources of determination, and they’ll win.All right, there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes—after all, the student who writes a brilliant forty-page thesis in a hard week has learned more than a little about her inner resources. Maybe it will give her needed confidence in the future. But doesn’t the content of the courses matter at all?On the evidence of this talk, no. Trying to figure out whether the stuff you’re reading is true or false and being open to having your lif/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmle changed is a fraught, controversial activity. Doing so requires energy from the professor—which is better spent on other matters. This kind of perspective-altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: trouble, arguments, bad press, etc. After the kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching. At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what t hey call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment andbu/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlilding another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yal e University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.You’ll also, if my father and I are right, be truly and righteously screw ed. The reason for this is simple. The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest. If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlam not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing.By the time you come to college, you will have been told who you are numberless times. Your parents and friends, your teachers, your counselors, your priests and rabbis and ministers and imams have all had their say. They’ve let you know how they size you up, and they’ve let you know what they think you should value. They’ve given you a sharp and pro tracted taste of what they feel is good and bad, right and wrong. Much is on their side. They have confronted you with scriptures—holy books that, whatever their actual provenance, have given people what they feel to be wisdom for thousands of years. They’ve given you family traditions—you’ve learned the ways of your tribe and your community. And, too, you’ve been tested, probed, looked at up and down and through. The coach knows what your athletic prospects are, th/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmle guidance office has a sheaf of test scores that relegate you to this or that ability quadrant, and your teachers have got you pegged. You are, as Foucault might say, the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses: you boy, you girl, have been made.And—contra Foucault—that’s not so bad. Embedded in all of the major religions are profound truths. Schopenhauer, who despised belief in transcendent things, nonetheless thought Christianity to be of inexpressible worth. He couldn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the afterlife, but to Schopenhauer, a deep pessimist, a religion that had as its central emblem the figure of a man being tortured on a cross couldn’t be entirely misleading. To the Christian, Schopenhaue r said, pain was at the center of the understanding of life, and that was just as it should be.One does not need to be as harsh as Schopenhauer to understand the use ofrel/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmligion, even if one does not believe in an otherworldly god. And all of those teachers and counselors and friends—and the prognosticating uncles, the dithering aunts, the fathers and mothers with their hopes for your fulfillment—or theirfulfillment in you—should not necessarily be cast aside or ignored. Families have their wisdom. The question “Who do they think you are at home?” is never an idle one.The major conservative thinkers have always been very serious about what goes by the name of common sense. Edmund Burke saw common sense as a loosely made, but often profound, collective work, in which humanity has deposited its hard-earned wisdom—the precipitate of joy and tears—over time. You have been raised in proximity to common sense, if you’ve been raised at all, and common sense is something to respect, though not quite—peace unto the formidable Burke—to revere.You may be all that the good people who/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html raised you say you are; you may want all they have shown you is worth wanting; you may be someone who is truly your father’s son or your mother’s daughter. But then again, you may not be.For the power that is in you, as Emerson suggested, may be new in nature. You may not be the person that your parents take you to be. And—this thought is both more exciting and more dangerous—you may not be the person that you take yourself to be, either. You may not have read yourself aright, and collegeis the place where you can find out whether you have or not. The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass others). The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html an “alienated majesty.” Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself. For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.This was my own experience reading the two writers who have influenced me the most, Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself. They shone a light onto the world and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too. From Emerson I learned to trust my own thoughts, to trust them even when every voice seems to be on the other side. I need the wherewithal, as Emerson did, to say what’s on my mind and to take theinevitable hits. Much more I learned from the sage—about character, about loss, about joy, about writing and its secret sources, but Emerson most centrally preaches the gospel of self-reliance and that is/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html what I have tried most to take from him. I continue to hold in mind one of Emerson’s most memorable passages: “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”Emerson’s greatness lies not only in showing you how powerful names and customs can be, but also in demonstrating how exhilarating it is to buck them. When he came to Harvard to talk about religion, he shocked the professors and students by challenging the divinity of Jesus and the truth of his miracles. He wasn’t invited back for decades.From Freud I found a great deal to ponder as well. I don’t mean Freud the aspiring scientist, but the Freud who was a speculative essayist and interpreter of the humanc/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlondition like Emerson. Freud challenges nearly every significant human ideal. He goes after religion. He says that it comes down to the longing for the father. He goes after love. He calls it “the overestimation of the erotic object.” He attacks our desire for charismatic popular leaders. We’re drawn to them because we hunger for absolute authority. He declares that dreams don’t predict the future and that there’s nothing benevolent about them. They’re disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.Freud has something challenging and provoking to say about virtually every human aspiration. I learned that if I wanted to affirm any consequential ideal, I had to talk my way past Freud. He was—and is—a perpetual challenge and goad.Never has there been a more shrewd and imaginative cartographer of the psyche. His separation of the self into three parts, and his sense of the fraught, anxious, but often negotiablerelations/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html among them (negotiable when youcome to the game with a Freudian knowledge), does a great deal to help one navigate experience. (Though sometimes—and this I owe to Emerson—it seems right to let the psyche fall into civil war, accepting barrages of anxiety and grief for this or that good reason.)The battle is to make such writers one’s ow n, to winnow them out and to find their essential truths. We need to see where they fall short and where they exceed the mark, and then to develop them a little, as the ideas themselves, one comes to see, actually developed others. (Both Emerson and Freud live out of Shakespeare—but only a giant can be truly influenced by Shakespeare.) In reading, I continue to look for one thing—to be influenced, to learn something new, to be thrown off my course and onto another, better way.My father knew that he was dissatisfied with life. He knew that none of the descriptions people had for h/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlim quite fit. He understood that he was always out-of-joint with life as it was. He had talent: My brother and I each got about half the raw ability he possessed and that’s taken us through life well enough. But what to do with that talent—there was the rub for my father. He used to stroll through the house intoning his favorite line from Groucho Marx’s ditty “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” (I recently asked my son, now twenty-one, if he thought I was mistaken in teaching him this particular song when he was six years old. “No!” he said, filling the air with an invisible forest of exclamation points.) But what my father never managed to get was a sense of who he might become. He never had a world of possibilities spread before him, never made sustained contact with the best that had been thought and said. He didn’t get to revise his understanding of himself, figure out what he’d do best that might give the world some profit.:///b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlarMy father was a gruff man, but also a generous one, so that night at the kitchen table at 58 Clewley Road he made an effort to let me have the chance that had been denied to him by both fate and character. He gave me the chance to see what I was all about, and if it proved to be different from him, proved even to be something he didn’t like or entirely comprehend, then he’d deal with it.Right now, if you’re going to get a real education, you may have to be aggressive and assertive.Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, is to ask you if the books c ontain truths you could live your lives by. When you read Plato, you’ll probably learn about his metaphysics and his politics and his way of conceiving thesoul. But no one will ask you if his ideas are good enough to believe in. No one will askyo/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlu, in the words of Emerson’s disciple William James, what their “cash value” might be. No one will suggest that you might use Plato as your bible for a week or a year or longer. No one, in short, will ask you to use Plato to help you change your life.That will be up to you. You must put the question of Plato to yourself. You must ask whether reason should always rule the passions, philosophers should always rule the state, and poets should inevitably be banished from a just commonwealth. You have to ask yourself if wildly expressive music (rock and rapand the rest) deranges the soul in ways that are destructive to its health. You must inquire of yourself if balanced calm is the most desirable human state.Occasionally—for you will need some help in fleshing-out the answers—you may have to prod your professors to see if they take the text at hand—in this case the divine and disturbing Plato—to be true. And you wil/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmll have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical. (Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.) You’ll be the one who pesters his teachers. You’ll ask your history teacher about whether there is a design to our history, whether we’re progressing or declining, or whether, in the words of a fine recent play, The History Boys, history’s “just one fuckin’ thing after another.” You’ll be the one who challenges your biology teacher about the intellectual conflict between evolution and creationist thinking. You’ll not only question the statistics teacher about what numbers ca n explain but what they can’t.Because every subject you study is a language and since you may adopt one of these languages as your own, you’ll want to know how to speak itexper/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmltly and also how it fails to deal with those concerns for which it has no adequate words. You’ll be looking into the reach of every metaphor that every discipline offers, and you’ll be trying to see around their corners.The whole business is scary, of course. What if you arrive at college devoted to pre-med, sure that nothing will make you and your family happier than a life as a physician, only to discover that elementary-school teaching is where your heart is?You might learn that you’re not meant to be a doctor at all. Of c ourse, given your intellect and discipline, you can still probably be one. You can pound your round peg through the very square hole of medical school, then go off into the profession. And society will help you. Society has a cornucopia of resources to enc ourage you in doing what society needs done but that you don’t much like doing and are not cut out to do. To ease your grief, society offer/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmls alcohol, television, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buyi ng what you don’t need. But all those too have their costs.Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go. Randall Jarrell once said that if he were a rich man, he would pay money to teach poetry to students. (I would, too, for what it’s worth.) In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.。
《现代大学英语精读5》课后句子翻译Lesson1-5
《现代大学英语精读5》课后句子翻译Lesson1-5《现代大学英语精读5》课后句子翻译-英译中Translate the Following into ChineseLesson One: Where Do We Go from Here?1、A white lie is better than a black lie.一个无关紧要的谎言总比一个恶意的谎言要好。
2、To upset this homicide, ---Olympian manhood.为了挫败这种蓄意培植的低人一等的心态，黑人必须直起腰来宣布自己高贵的人格。
3、with a spirit straining ---- self-abnegation.黑人必须以一种竭尽全力自尊自重的精神，大胆抛弃自我克制的枷锁。
4、what is needed is a realization---- sentimental and anemic.必须懂得的是没有爱的权力是毫无节制，易被滥用的，而没有权力的爱则是多愁善感，苍白无力的。
5、It is precisely this collision --- of our times.正是这种邪恶的权力与毫无权力的道义的冲突构成了我们时代的主要危机。
6、Now early in this century---and responsibility.在本世纪初，这种建议会受到嘲笑和谴责，认为它对主动性和责任感起负面作用。
7、The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriched literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living.事实上，人们从事改善人类出镜的工作，从事传播知识、增强实力、丰富文学财富以及升华思想的工作并不是为了谋生。
Lesson 2-Two Kinds
About the author
• Both of her parents were Chinese immigrants. • Her father, John Tan, was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who came to America to escape the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War. The miserable early life of her mother, Daisy, inspired Amy Tan’s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife.
About the author
• Just as she was embarking on this new career, Tan’s mother fell ill. Amy Tan promised herself that if her mother recovered, she would take her to China, to see the daughter who had been left behind almost forty years before.
About the author
• In China, Daisy had divorced an abusive husband. She was forced to leave her three daughters behind when she escaped on the last boat to Shanghai before the Communist takeover in 1949. Her marriage to John Tan produced three children, Amy and her two brothers.
大学英语精读第五册lessontwotwokinds教学设计教案
2. tending to persuade by forcefulness of argument
pathos: [ 'peiθɔs ]
n. 感伤,悲怅,悲情
a feeling of sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others The play is notable for the pathos of its final scene. 该剧以最后一场的哀婉 动人而著称。
Introduction of The Joy Luck Club(4)
The mother-daughter relationships are a mixture of love and hostility, expectations and disappointments, conflict and reconciliation. When the daughters become older and more mature, they begin to reconsider their identity and reevaluate their cultural heritage. They discover that their mothers are “in their bones”, and that heritage is not something they can ignore and shake off easily.
敦缺少体育设施.
Part two Background information
The Joy Luck Club, from which “Two Kinds” is taken, explores conflicts between two generations and two different cultures. Set in China and in the United States, the novel is woven by stories of four Chinese mothers and their four daughters. Four Chinese women, who have just arrived in the United States and who are
Advanced English 1 Lesson 2 Two Kinds课件
2. The writing styles of the author
• Unconventional structure • Memoir • Passion • Simplicity • Humor • Rhetorical devices (simile, imagery)
conventional style VS Amy Tan’s new style
1. About the author——Amy Tan
Novels: • The Joy Luck Club (1989) • The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) • The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) • The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001)
Development: dynamic and sychronic characters Conflict: protagonist and antagonist Role: majoy and minor characters Dimention: round and flat characters
point of view:
The first person The third person The second person Omniscient point of view Dramatic point of view
General understanding of the novel
Advan Kinds
——Amy Tan
Two Kinds
Contents
Background information General understanding of the novel
现代大学英语精读5lesson2课文Two_KindsWord版
Two KindsAmy TanMy mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.“Of course, you can be a prodigy1, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.”America was where all my m other’s hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple2. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother would poke my arm and say, “Ni kan.You watch.” And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying “Oh, my goodness.”“Ni kan,” my mother said, as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. “You already know how. Don’t need talent for crying!”Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz3. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair.“You look like a Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose.The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off4 thesesoggy clumps to make my hair even again. “Peter Pan5is very popular these days” the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy’s, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella6 stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But someti mes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And then you’ll always be nothing.”Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica7 topped kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children.The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. “What’s the capital of Finland?” my mother ask ed me, looking at the story.All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento8was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown9. “Nairobi10!” I quessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce “Helsinki11” before showing me the answer.The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los angeles, New York, and London.One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember. “Now Jehoshaphat had riches12 and honor in abundance and that’s all I remember, Ma,” I said.And after seeing, on ce again, my mother’s disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back---and understood that it would always be this ordinary face ---I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me---a face I had never seen before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won’ts. I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not.So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted ony one bellow, maybe two at most.At last she was beginning to give up hope.Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show13 on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up, the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down, silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial.She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones.“Ni kan,” my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. “Look here.”I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation.In spite of these warning signs, I wasn’t worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn’t afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed14 the little girl on TV.“Play note right, but doesn’t sound good!” my mother complained “No singing sound.”“What are you picking on her for?” I said carelessly. “She’s pretty good. May be she’s not the best, but she’s trying hard.” I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that.“Just like you,” she said. “Not the best. Because you not trying.” She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down onthe sofa.The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of “Anitra’s Tanz,” by Grieg15. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr.Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell.I wished and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn”t stand it anymore.“Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius! I can’t play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn’t go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!” I cried.My mother slapped me. “Who ask you be genius.”she shouted. “Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!”“So ungrateful,”I heard her mutter in chinese. “If she had as much talent as she had temper, she would be famous now.”Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the hair on top of his head and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always thought, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married.I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person’s, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up.I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. “Like Beethoven!” he shouted to me “We’re both listeningonly in our head!” And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas16.Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their purpose: “Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!” And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand.I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a cat running up and down on top of garbag e cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say “Very good! Bt now ou must learn to keep time!”So that’s how I discovered that Old Chong’s eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios17. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato18 like an obedient little soldier.He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn’t practiced enough, I never corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie.19So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns.Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Linds daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other.I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as “Chinatown’s Littlest Chinese Chess Champion.”“She bring home too many trophy.” Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. “All day she play chess. All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings.” She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her.“You lucky you don’t have this problem,” Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother.And my mother squared her shoulders and bra gged “our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It’s like you can’t stop this natural talent.”And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room.For the tale nt show I was to play a piece called “Pleading Child” from Schumann’s Scenes From Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing.I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile.My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops20in pink ballet tutus21, and when they bowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, “Awww,” and then clap enthusiastically.When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother’s blank face, my father’s yawn, Auntie Lindo’s stiff-lipped smile, Waverly’s sulky expression. I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV.And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I wasn’t worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn’t stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched.I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way.When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my rightfoot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except fot Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting “Bravo! Bravo! Well done!” By then I saw my mother’s face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. “That was awful,” and mother whispered “Well, she certainly tried.”And now I realized how many people were in the audience, the whole world, it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back.I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show.We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly22 and got an honorable mention. And the eleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee.After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my mother and father.“Lots of talented kids,” Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. “That was something else,” my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done.Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “You aren’t a genius like me,” she said matter-of-fact ly. And if I hadn’t felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach.But my mother’s expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery.I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV.“Four clock,” she reminded me, as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV.“Turn off TV,” she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn’t budge. And then I decided, I didn’t have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one.She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. “Four clock,” she said once again, louder.“I’m not going to play anymore,” I said nonchalantly23. “Why should I? I’m not a genius.”She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.“No!” I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along.“No! I won’t!” I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying.“You want me to be something that I’m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!”“Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!”“Then I wish I weren’t your daughter, I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.“Too late to change this,” my mother said shrilly.And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that’s when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. “Then I wish I’d never been born!” I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.”It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As24. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college.Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me.And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible delarations afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable.And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most:Why had she given up hope? For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped The lid to the piano was closed shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.So she surprised me. A few years ago she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed. “Are you sure?” I asked shyly. “I mean, won’t you and Dad miss it?” “No, this your piano,” she said firmly. “Always your piano. You only one can play.”“Well, I probably can’t play anymore,” I said. “It’s been years.” “You pick up fast,” my mother said, as if she knew this was certain. “You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to.”“No, I couldn’t.”“You just not trying,” my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing a fact that could never be disproved. “Take it,” she said.But I didn’t at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, everytime I saw it in my parents’living room, standing in front of the bay window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy that I had won back.Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent’s apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been bgetting things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put in mothproof boxes. I found some old chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk against my skin, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me.After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes with handwritten scales, the same sedcondhand music books with their covers held together with yellow tape.I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piecce I had playedat the recital. It was on the left-hand page, “Pleading Child”It looked more difficult than I remembered. I played a few bars, surprised at howeasily the notes came back to me.And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side, It was called “Perfectly Contented” I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with the same flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. “Pleading Child” was shorter but slower; “Perfectly Contented” was longer but faster. And after I had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.（注：可编辑下载，若有不当之处，请指正，谢谢!）。
大学英语精读：第五册UNIT2
Beginning with the earliest pioneers, Americans have always highly valued their freedoms, and fought hard to protect them. And yet, the author points out that there is a basic freedom which Americans are in danger of losing. What is this endangered freedom? For what reasons could freedom-loving Americans possibly let this freedom slip away? And what-steps can they take to protect it —— their fifth freedom?The Fifth Freedomby Seymour St . John More than three centuries ago a handful of pioneers crossed the ocean t Jamestown and Plymouth in search of freedoms they were unable to find in their own countries, the freedoms of we still cherish today: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. Today the descendants of the early settlers, and those who have joined them since, are fighting to protect these freedoms at home and throughout the world. And yet there is a fifth freedom - basic to those four - that we are in danger of losing: the freedom to be one's best. St. Exupery describes a ragged, sensitive-faced Arab child, haunting the streets of a North African town, as a lost Mozart: he would never be trained or developed. Was he free? "No one grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time; and nought will awaken in you the sleeping poet or musician or astronomer that possibly inhabited you from the beginning." The freedom to be one's best is the chance for the development of each person to his highest power. How is it that we in America have begun to lose this freedom, and how can we regain it for our nation's youth? I believe it has started slipping away from us because of three misunderstandings. First, the misunderstanding of the meaning of democracy. The principal of a great Philadelphia high school is driven to cry for help in combating the notion that it is undemocratic to run a special program of studies for outstanding boys and girls. Again, when a good independent school in Memphis recently closed, some thoughtful citizens urged that it be taken over by the public school system and used for boys and girls of high ability, what it have entrance requirements and give an advanced program of studies to superior students who were interested and able to take it. The proposal was rejected because it was undemocratic! Thus, courses are geared to the middle of the class. The good student is unchallenged, bored. The loafer receives his passing grade. And the lack of an outstanding course for the outstanding student, the lack of a standard which a boy or girl must meet, passes for democracy. The second misunderstanding concerns what makes for happiness. The aims of our present-day culture are avowedly ease and material well-being: shorter hours; a shorter week; more return for less accomplishment; more softsoap excuses and fewer honest, realistic demands. In our schools this is reflected by the vanishing hickory stick and the emerging psychiatrist. The hickory stick had its faults, and the psychiatrist has his strengths. But hickory stick had its faults, and the psychiatrist has his strengths. But the trend is clear. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardoner （To understand everything is to excuse everything）. Do we really believe that our softening standards bring happiness? Is it our sound and considered judgment that the tougher subjects of the classics and mathematics should be thrown aside, as suggested by some educators, for doll-playing? Small wonder that Charles Malik, Lebanese delegate at the U.N., writes: "There is in the West"（in the United States） "a general weakening of moral fiber. （Our） leadership does not seem to be adequate to the unprecedented challenges of the age." The last misunderstanding is in the area of values. Here are some of the most influential tenets of teacher education over the past fifty years: there is no eternal truth; there is no absolute moral law; there is no God. Yet all of history has taught us that the denial of these ultimates, the placement of man or state at the core of the universe, results in a paralyzing mass selfishness; and the first signs of it are already frighteningly evident. Arnold Toynbee has said that all progress, all development come from challenge and a consequent response. Without challenge there is no response, no development, no freedom. So first we owe to our children the most demanding, challenging curriculum that is within their capabilities. Michelangelo did not learn to paint by spending his time doodling. Mozart was not an accomplished pianist at the age of eight as the result or spending his days in front of a television set. Like Eve Curie, like Helen Keller, they responded to the challenge of their lives by a disciplined training: and they gained a new freedom. The second opportunity we can give our boys and girls is the right to failure. "Freedom is not only a privilege, it is a test," writes De Nouy. What kind of a test is it, what kind of freedom where no one can fail? The day is past when the United States can afford to give high school diplomas to all who sit through four years of instruction, regardless of whether any visible results can be discerned. We live in a narrowed world where we must be alert, awake to realism; and realism demands a standard which either must be met or result in failure. These are hard words, but they are brutally true. If we deprive our children of the right to fail we deprive them of their knowledge of the world as it is. Finally, we can expose our children to the best values we have found. By relating our lives to the evidences of the ages,by judging our philosophy in the light of values that history has proven truest, perhaps we shall be able to produce that "ringing message, full of content and truth, satisfying the mind, appealing to the heart, firing the will, a message on which one can stake his whole life." This is the message that could mean joy and strength and leadership —— freedom as opposed to serfdom. NEW WORDS cherish vt. care for tenderly; keep alive 爱护，珍爱；抱有，怀有 religion n. 宗教 settler n. a person who has settled in a newly developed country; colonist 移民；殖民者 sensitive a. quick to receive impressions; easily hurt or offended 敏感的 sensitive-faced a. having a sensitive face Arab n., a. 阿拉伯⼈（的）；阿拉伯的 haunt vt. visit often lost a. not used, won, or claimed; ruined or destroyed physically or morally grasp vt. seize firmly with the hand（s） or arm（s）; understand with the mind 抓住，抱住；理解，掌握 nought n. （old use or lit） nothing; zero awaken vt. arouse from sleep; make active musician n. a composer or performer of music inhabit vt. live or dwell in regain vt. gain or get again; get back democracy n. government by the people, esp. rule by the majority principal n. head of a school combat vt. n. fight; struggle notion n. idea; belief; opinion undemocratic a. not democratic; not in accordance with the principles of democracy independent a. not subject to control or rule by another; not depending on others for support independent school a private school, not controlled by the public urge vt. present, advocate or demand earnestly; push or drive loafer n. a person who spends time idly 游⼿好闲的⼈ lack n. not have; have less than enough of avowedly ad. as declared openly or frankly softsoap a. 姑息的，软⾔相劝的 realistic a. having or showing an inclination to face facts and to deal with them sensibly practical hickory n. ⼭核桃（⽊） hickory stick ⼭核桃⽊做的教鞭 classics n. the language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome doll n. a small-scale figure of a human being, used as a child's plaything Lebanese n., a. 黎巴嫩⼈（的）；黎巴嫩的 delegate n. a person sent with power to act for another; representative 代表 U.N., the the United Nations 联合国 weaken vt. make or become weak（er） fiber n. a person's inner character; quality; strength leadership n. power of leading; the qualities of a leader unprecedented having no precedent ⽆先例的，空前的 influential a. having or exerting influence tenet n. a principle or belief held by a person or organization 信条，原则 eternal a. having no beginning and no end; lasting forever 永恒的；不朽的 denial n. a refusal to admit the truth of a statement or to grant sth. asked for ultimate n. fundamental principle; final point or result placement n. an act or instance of placing, esp. the assignment of a person to a suitable place core n. the most important or central part of anything 核⼼ paralyze vt. make powerless or unable to act, move or function 使⿇痹，使瘫痪 selfishness n. a concern for one's own welfare or advantage at the expense or in disregard of others selfish a. consequent a. following as a consequence curriculum n. a course of study, esp. the body of courses offered in a school or college （学校的全部）课程 capability n. power of doing things 能⼒，才能 paint v. make a picture （of） with paint doodle vi. draw irregular lines, figures, etc. aimlessly while thinking about sth. else ⼼不在焉地乱写乱画 pianist n. person who plays the piano discipline vt. apply discipline to regardless a. having or taking no regard; careless 不关⼼的；不留⼼的 visible a. capable of being seen; apparent discern vt. see, notice, or understand, esp. with difficulty; perceive realism n. accepting and dealing with life and its problems in a practical way, without being influenced by feelings or false ideas relate vt. connect in thought or meaning fire vt. inspire; stimulate or inflame stake vt. risk （money, one's life, etc.） on a result; bet 把……押下打赌 oppose vt. set oneself against; set up against 反对；使对抗 serfdom vt. the state or fact of being a serf; slavery 农奴的境遇;奴役 PHRASES & EXPRESSIONS a handful of a small amount or number of in search of trying to find cry for cry in an attempt to get; demand urgently; need badly pass for be （mistakenly） accepted or considered as help cause sth. to happen small wonder /little wonder / no wonder naturally; it is not surprising regardless of without worrying about to taking into account relate to / with show a link or connection between in the light of taking into account; considering stake on risk （one's money, reputation, life, etc.） on as opposed to in contrast to PROPER NAMES Seymour St. John 西摩.圣约翰 Jamestown 詹姆斯敦 Plymouth 普利茅斯 St.Exupery 圣.埃克休帕⾥ Mozart 莫扎特 Memphis 孟菲斯 Charles Malik 查尔斯.马⽴克 Arnold Toynbee 阿诺德.汤因⽐ Michelangelo ⽶开朗琪罗 Eve Curie De Nouy 德.纽伊。
Two-Kinds
10
II. Comprehension & Appreciation
声音、曲子等）
Samples: 1. The melody is still lingering about long after
the piano. 2. 余音袅袅。 2. A haunting melody 萦绕心头的旋律
9
II. Comprehension & Appreciation
Read para.90 and answer the question below. What’s the implied meanings of what the daughter did?
2. 袋鼠把幼崽放在育儿袋内。
3. 2. She kept her money in a pouch around her neck.
4. 她把钱装在脖子上挂的荷包里。
5. 3. The old man is always carrying a tobacco pouch with him.
这老汉总是随身带着烟袋。
2. If someone speaks for a long time, or says something that is boring or that has been heard many times before, you can describe it as a recital. （乏味的）叙说；唠叨；老生常谈
5-2 Lesson Two Two Kinds
She did not remember how far she walked, which direction she went, when she fainted or how she was found…
I. Background Knowledge (7): Ed Sullivan
An American columnist, ran a popular variety series on CBS television from 1948 to 1971; Every Sunday night for more than two decades Ed Sullivan brought an incredible variety of entertainment into American homes, including grand operas, the latest rock music, ballets, and comedies.
II. Organization (1)
The beginning (Paras. 1-3): Background 1information, esp. my mother’s expectations of me; mother’ The middle (Paras. 4-76): How my mother tried 4to make sb out of me; The ending (Paras. 77-93): 77How my mum made peace with me (Paras. 77-89) 77The epiphany—my childhood was made up of two epiphany— sides (a bittersweet childhood) due to the loveloveandand-hate relation with my mother. Now as an adult, I can understand my mother better (Paras. 90-93). 90-
现代大学英语精读5 lesson 2 Two_Kinds课件
的核心语言点。
教学内容 1. 热身 2．作者 教育与背景
3．作品赏析： Ø 结构分析 Ø 文学作品 Ø 扩展式讨论
如何赏析
4．写作技巧： Ø Ø 倒装句
省略疑问句和修辞疑问句
5．语言理解 Ø 核心词汇学习
6．课堂讨论
7．练与讲
教学重点 1. 文学作品的赏析；
2．文学中的修辞手法―― antithesis（反对）、 Anaphora(首语重复法)
授课教案:现代大学英语精读第5册
Unit Two Two Kinds
课程名称：高级英语
教学对象：英语专业本科三年级
教学目的 1. 了解作者及其背景知识；
2．熟悉本文使用的写作手法；
手法等
3．掌握修辞疑问句、倒装句等修辞
4．熟练掌握三类构词法；
5．通过深刻理解文章内涵，培养学
生社会洞察力和相关的讨论能力，同时掌握文中
1. tinged with sadness 2. having a taste that is a mixture of bitterness and sweetness
A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past. 怀旧 对过去事物、人或环境苦乐参半的渴望
between two cultures. The mother, who was born and educated in China,represented Chinese culture and traditional value outlook, but the
daughter, who was born and educated in America, represented alien culture and value outlook. The title, which seems very simple, is profound
现代大学英语精读5lesson2课文Two_Kinds
Two KindsAmy TanMy mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.“Of course, you can be a prodigy1, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.”America was where all my m other’s hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple2. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother would poke my arm and say, “Ni kan.You watch.” And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying “Oh, my goodness.”“Ni kan,” my mother said, as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. “You already know how. Don’t need talent for crying!”Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz3. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair.“You look like a Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose.The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off4 these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. “Peter Pan5is very popular these days” the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy’s, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut, and it made meactually look forward to my future fame.In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so.I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella6stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And then you’ll always be nothing.”Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica7topped kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children.The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. “What’s the capital of Finland?” my mother aske d me, looking at the story.All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento8 was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown9. “Nairobi10!” I quessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce “Helsinki11” before showing me the answer.The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los angeles, New York, and London.One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember. “Now Jehoshaphat had riches12 and honor in abundance and that’s all I remember, Ma,” I said.And after seeing, onc e again, my mother’s disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back---and understood that it would always be this ordinary face ---I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me---a face I had never seen before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won’ts. I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not.So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted ony one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope.Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show13 on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up, the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down, silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial.She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing,lilting ones.“Ni kan,” my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. “Look here.”I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation.In spite of these warning signs, I wasn’t worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn’t afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano less ons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed14 the little girl on TV.“Play note right, but doesn’t sound good!” my mother complained “No singing sound.”“What are you picking on her for?” I said carelessly. “She’s pretty good. Mayb e she’s not the best, but she’s trying hard.” I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that.“Just like you,” she said. “Not the best. Because you not trying.” She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa.The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of “Anitra’s Tanz,” by Grieg15. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr.Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I wished and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn”t stand it anymore.“Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius! I can’t play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn’t go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!” I cried.My mother slapped me. “Who ask you be genius.”she shouted. “Only ask you beyour best. For you sake. You think I want you be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!”“So ungrateful,”I heard her mutter in chinese. “If she had as much talent as she had temper, she would be famous now.”Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the hair on top of his head and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always thought, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married.I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, likea baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person’s, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up.I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. “Like Beethoven!” he shouted to me “We’re both listening only in our head!” And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas16.Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their purpose: “Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!”And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand.I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a cat running up and down on top of garbage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say “Very good! Bt now ou must learn to keep time!”So that’s how I discovered that Old Chong’s eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios17. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to makeeach finger dance up and down, staccato18 like an obedient little soldier.He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn’t practiced enough, I never corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie.19So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns.Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Linds daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as “Chinatown’s Littlest Chinese Chess Champion.”“She bring home too many trophy.” Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. “All day she play chess. All day I h ave no time do nothing but dust off her winnings.” She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her.“You lucky you don’t have this problem,” Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother.And my mother squared her shoulders and bragge d “our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It’s like you can’t stop this natural talent.”And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room.For the talent show I was to play a piece called “Pleading Child” fromSchumann’s Scenes From Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile.My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops20 in pink ballet tutus21, and when they bowe d or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, “Awww,” and then clap enthusiastically.When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother’s blank face, my father’s yawn, Auntie Lindo’s stiff-lipped smile, Waverly’s sulky expression. I had on a white dress, layere d with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV.And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I wasn’t worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn’t stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way.When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just beennervous, and the audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except fot Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting “Bravo! Bravo! Well done!” By then I saw my mother’s face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. “That was awful,” and mother whispered “Well, she certainly tried.”And now I realized how many people were in the audience, the whole world, it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back. I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show.We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly22and got an honorable mention. And the eleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee.After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my mother and father.“Lots of talented kids,” Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. “That was something else,” my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done.Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “You aren’t a genius like me,” she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn’t felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach.But my mother’s expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got homebefore shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery.I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV.“Four clock,” s he reminded me, as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV.“Turn off TV,” she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn’t budge. And then I decided, I didn’t have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one.She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. “Four clock,” she said once again, louder.“I’m not going to play anymore,” I said nonchalantly23. “Why should I? I’m not a genius.”She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.“No!” I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along.“No! I won’t!” I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying.“You want me to be something that I’m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!”“Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in thishouse. Obedient daughter!”“Then I wish I weren’t your daughter, I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.“Too late to change this,” my mother said shrilly.And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that’s when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. “Then I wish I’d never been born!” I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.”It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As24. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college.Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me.And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible delarations afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable.And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped The lid to the piano was closed shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.So she surprised me. A few years ago she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed. “Are you sure?” I asked shyly. “I mean, won’t you and Dad miss it?” “No, this your piano,” she said firmly. “Always your如有帮助欢迎下载支持piano. You only one can play.”“Well, I probably can’t play anymore,” I said. “It’s been years.” “You pick up fast,” my mother said, as if she knew this was certain. “You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to.”“No, I couldn’t.”“You just not trying,” my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sa d. She said it as if announcing a fact that could never be disproved. “Take it,” she said.But I didn’t at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, everytime I saw it in my parents’living room, standing in front of the bay wi ndow, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy that I had won back.Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent’s apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been bgetting things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put in mothproof boxes. I found some old chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk against my skin, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me.After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes with handwritten scales, the same sedcondhand music books with their covers held together with yellow tape.I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piecce I had played at the recital. It was on the left-hand page, “Pleading Child” It l ooked more difficult than Iremembered. I played a few bars, surprised at how easily the notes came back to me. And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side, It was called “Perfectly Contented” I tried to play this on e as well. It had a lighter melody but with the same flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. “Pleading Child” was shorter but slower; “Perfectly Contented” was longer but faster. And afterI had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.11。
现代大学英语精读5(第二版)课文翻译(1-11课)
现代大学英语译文及练习答案一、Where_do_we_go_from_here我们向何处去？马丁.路德.金1．为了回答“我们向何处去”这一问题，我们现在必须明确我们的现状。
当初拟定宪法时，一个不可思议的公式规定黑人在纳税和选举权方面只是一个完整人的60%。
如今又一个匪夷所思的公式似乎规定黑人只盂交纳一个人应交税的50%，只享受一个人应享受的选举权利的50%。
对于生活中的好事，黑人大约只享有白人所享受的一半；而生活中的不愉快，黑人却要承受白人所面对的两倍。
因此，所有黑人中有一半人住着低标准的住房。
并且黑人的收入只是白人的一半。
每当审视生活中的负面经历时，黑人总是占双倍的份额。
黑人无业者是白人的两倍。
黑人婴儿的死亡率是白人的两倍，从黑人所占的总人口比率上看，在越南死亡的黑人是白人的两倍。
2．其他领域也有同样惊人的数字。
在小学，黑人比白人落后一至三年，并且他们的被白人隔离的学校的学生人均所得到的补贴比白人的学校少得多。
20个上大学的学生中，只有一个是黑人。
在职的黑人中75%的人从事低收入、单凋乏味的非技术性工作。
3．这就是我们的现状。
我们的出路在哪里?首先，我们必须维护自己的尊严和价值。
我们必须与仍压迫我们的制度抗争，从而树立崇高的不可诋毁的价值观。
我们再不能因为是自已黑人而感到羞耻。
几百年来灌输黑人是卑微的、无足轻重的，因此要唤起他们做人的尊严绝非易事。
4．甚至语义学似乎也合谋把黑色的说成足丑陋的、卑劣的。
罗杰特分类词典中与黑色相关的词有120个，其中至少60个微词匿影藏形，例如。
污渍、煤烟、狰狞的、魔鬼和恶臭的。
而与白色相关的词约有134个，它们却毫无例外都褒嘉洋溢，诸如纯洁、洁净、贞洁和纯真此类词等。
白色的(善意的)谎言总比黑色的(恶意的)谎言要好。
家中最为人所不齿的人是“黑羊”，即败家子。
奥西．戴维斯曾建议或许应重造英语语言，从而教师将不再迫不得已因教黑人孩子60种方式蔑视自己而使他们继续怀有不应有的自卑感，因教白人孩子134种方式宠爱自己而使他们继续怀有不应有的优越感。
现代大学英语2two-kindsppt课件
Analyzing Characters’ Motivations
1. Why do you think the mother wants her daughter to be a prodigy? If you had a daughter, would you want her to be a prodigy? (Consider what the mother has gone through.) Why or why not?
❖ Plot: the story that is told in a novel or play or movie etc., which is the deliberately arranged sequence of interrelated events that constitute the basic narrative structure of a novel or short story
2. What happens when kids don’t live up to their parents’ expectations?
3. What can parents and children do to have a good relationship?
4. Do parents ever make their children do things so that they look good?
5. Why do you think the daughter refuses to continue her piano lessons? Would you do the same? Why or why not?
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The Joy Luck Club
It tells stores about four pairs of mothers and daughters---Suyuan Woo and Jing-mei(June); Anmei Hsu and Rose; Lindo Jong and Waverly; Ying-ying St. Clair and Lena. These stories are told by seven voices, those of the mothers and daughters except for Suyuan Woo, who is dead when the story begins in the book. The different points of view enable the reader to look at the bittersweet motherdaughter relations from different angles.
Her major works
The Ketchen God’s Wife (1991) 《灶神之妻》
The Hundred Secret Sense(1995) 《百种神秘感觉》
The Bonesetter’s Daughter(2001) 《接骨师之女》
The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Cl源自b The book focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Fracisco, California who start a club known as “the Joy Luck Club”, playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a varieay of foods.
“At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese
Shirley Temple.”(para.4) “In the beginning, I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so.”(para.9) “But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient.” (para. 11)
Her successful daughters
Sophia is
accepted by both Harvard and Yale university.
Lulu became the
concertmaster of Yale Youth Orchestra when she was only 12.
“I could see why my mother was fascinated by the
music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut.”(para.24} “The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of “Anitra’s Tanz,” by Grieg15. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.”(para.28)
Section 3(21-28)
While watching a Chinese girl playing the piano on Ed
Sullivan Show, a new idea flashed into the mother’s head. With the new plan introduced, the conflict would develop further.
Part II (Paras. 4-76) Section 1 (Paras. 4-11)
This part is about the mother’s unsuccessful attempt
to change her daughter into a Chinese Shirley Temple. In the beginning the child was as excited as the mother about becoming a prodigy. At this point, the conflict between mother and daughter was not visible.
“She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of
amazing children that she read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. ”(para.12) “So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was.”(para.20)
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. It's also about Mozart and Mendelssohn, the piano and the violin, and how we made it to Carnegie Hall. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.
Tiger mother
attend a sleepover have a play date watch TV or play computer games be in school play get any grade less than an “A” choose their own extracurricular activities get any grade less than an A not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama play any instrument other than the piano or violin not play the piano or violin.
Background Information
Amy Tan
Amy Tan
Chinese American writer
Born in Oakland, California, in 1952 Master’s degree in linguistics from San
Jose State university A consultant to programs for disabled children, later a free-lance writer.
The structure of the story
Part Ⅰ (para.1-3) Exposition Part Ⅱ (para.4-60) Rising action
section 1 (para.4-11) section 2 (para.12-20) section 3 ( para.21-28) section 4 (para.29-46) section 5 (para.47-60) section 6 (para.61-76) Climax Part Ⅲ (para.77-93) section 1(para.77-89) Falling action section 2(para.90-93) Resolution
Her first book the Joy Luck Club was published in 1989.
The Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan’s first and most successful novel. The novel was adapted into a feature film and a play in 1993.
Contemporary College English
Lesson 2
Two Kinds
Amy Tan
余斓
九江学院外语学院
Lead-in
What is the relationship between you and
your mother? the apple of mum’s eye Generation gap expect their daughters to be talent having more happiness Tiger mother
Part Ⅰ
provides the reader with some background information.
The mother had to be here in America after losing everything in China in 1949. It tells about the mother and her hopes for her daughter, which paves the way for the development of the conflict between the two generations. “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America.” (para.1) “Of course you can be prodigy, too.” (para.2) “You can be best anything.” (para.3)