放弃不需要勇气英语作文(汇编20篇)

勇气，是一条结实的小船，让你扬起自信的风帆，穿越湍急的河流，驶向成功的彼岸。 courage is a strong boat that allows you to raise confident sails, cross the turbulent river, and drive to the other side of success.

勇气是大胆尝试

“谁来回答这个问题?”老师话音刚落，同学们就迫不及待的举起了自信的小手。而我呢?蜷缩在角落里，不敢表现自己，即使这个问题简单的人人都会做。

我在做激烈的思想斗争：为什么不敢举手呢?不会吗?不是啊，只是我可能，很可能，极有可能会答错。上小学的时候，不是有一次自己回答错了问题，同学们纷纷向我蹩来嘲笑的目光吗?可是……谁能不经历挫折呢?人们是在战胜挫折和失败中成长和发展起来的。相信自己，我能行。我自信的举起了手。

从此，我就有足够的勇气迎接未来。

勇气就是挑战极线

天上火辣辣的太阳照的人们快要窒息，一丝风也没有。虽然今天是要回家的日子，可我的心却高兴不起来。

一幕幕在大脑里翻江倒海：孩子，下次妈妈不去接你了，自己回家。听完后，我怏怏不乐。

时间飞逝，我该怎么办呢?难道我就在这傻等不可能的奇迹出现吗?可是万一我坐车，有小偷把我的东西抢走了怎么办?万一……哪有那么多万一?老天爷，开开恩吧，热死我了。不听话，我还是自己回家吧。为什么别人行我就不可以呢?我能行!

我相信我能行，我果然能行。此后，我的勇气存款中又多了一些钱。

勇气就是超越自己

“你去问问路吧!”一锤子狠狠的砸在了我的心头，但父母命难违。可是，要我在这个人生地不熟的地方问陌生人路。万一他们不理睬我怎么办?万一他们听不懂我的方言怎么办?我扪心自问：刘晓，你这样羞羞哒哒的，以后如何成大事?你忘掉你的梦想了吗?

我鼓足勇气去问一个文质彬彬的女士：请问，您知道去迎宾路怎么走吗?我小心翼翼的用普通话说。她把详细的走法告诉了我，我礼貌的说了声“谢谢。”

我感到我心中有股自豪感在升腾。从此，我有足够的勇气挑战未来。

勇气是相信自己能做成某件事，实现自己的目标，让每一个人持有相信自己必定成功的心态。十五岁，我多了一份勇气。

爱一个人真的是需要勇气的，因为当你接受一段爱情时，随之就要付出很多，也许起初你并不懂得如何去呵护这份爱，也许你呵护过火，对对方太好，而给对方了莫大的压力，也许你并无在意，以为只要对他(她)好就行了，但你并不知道对方需要什么，时间久了，你们会因为一点点小事而生气，吵架甚至分手。爱是由不得一个人无理取闹的，爱是需要彼此信任的。“感觉”这个东西也是奇怪，感觉在时，一切都好办，感觉没了，什么东西都不可能办好。

请你们记得好好珍惜对方，要懂得沟通，如果你爱他(她)就尊重他(她)，如果你现在刚刚分手，请不要化作敌人，请记得你们曾经相爱过，不要在乎结果，只要过程中有过美好的回忆，那就不要觉得有遗憾了。你不要想不开，因为毕竟彼此爱过。只能说你们有缘无份，也许你的另一半一直在前面等你去寻找。也许人生就是这样，有着开心，有着心酸。你有时也许会抱怨上天对你太不公平，你对他(她)这么好，他(她)却这么绝。其实你大可不必这样想，你今天付出的多，将来回报的更多。爱就是自私的，感觉没了，你对他好只能是一种负累。何不宽大你的胸怀，给对方幸福，放他(她)离开，这也是给自己一次新的机会。给他幸福，也许你以后更幸福。所以爱一个人是需要勇气的，你如果想经营一段爱情，就要做好一切准备!

生命是片辽阔草原，有许多路等你来走，只有有勇气的人，才会为自己选择一条合适的路;生命是大海中飘着的一只纸船，纸船上有一条鱼，如果这条鱼想自由，那么它将要要有足够勇气;生命是在森林中的一只小狼，母亲走了，它该怎么活?首先它要有勇气，要表现出一只狼那样威猛的气概;生命是冰天雪地中的一只小北极熊，它走失了，它将靠什么让纯嫩的自己坚强起来?是勇气!米歇潘曾说过一句话：“生命是一条艰险的峡谷，只有勇敢的人才能通过。”

不经历风雨怎么见彩虹?每个人都不能随随便便的成功。在生命的路上充满了坎坷，在生命的大海中拥有着风暴，只有有勇气的人才能走出那条坎坷的路，来到一条平坦的大路。只有有勇气的人才能在大海中劈波斩浪，奋勇前行，最后到达彼岸。

生命只有一次，我们要珍惜生命，决不让它白白流失拥有足够的勇气，让自己活的更加光彩有力!

每当我看到那些在风雨中昂首挺胸的花草,我会告诉自己:要好好珍惜生命,要像它们一样有勇气战胜困难,让生命充满光彩. 生命需要勇气作文树,砍断枝条还能再生;草,烧了...

在我们成长的途中会遇到不少挫折，会摔倒过很多次，也会经受失败带来的困惑，在这些困阻中我们会怎样面对呢？是的，我们需要勇气，我们要有勇气战胜挫折，要有勇气站起来战胜一切艰难困阻，不要因为一点小困难就退缩，不要因为一个“我不会”而担忧，我们并不是一生下来就什么都会的，我们要在成长的过程中不断的学习，正因为这样，所以我们需要很大的勇气。

小时候的我并不懂事，以为取得一点小小的成功就是走向成长最好的捷径，那时我问妈妈快快成长的方法是什么，妈妈只是笑了笑拍拍我的脑袋说“努力”我被这简短的两个字所疑惑，但我死要面子的朝妈妈点了点头，后来一次小小的数学测试本来还自信满满的我被这眼前的题目所难住，结果考了个不及格回家，我伤心的走到家问妈妈有没有什么不努力就能快快成长的方法，妈妈又是笑了笑说“失败没关系，在成长的道路上难免会遇到挫折，只有有勇气战胜挫折，我相信你会成功的”或许在成长的道路上我们真正需要的并不是挫折，我们需要的是足够让我们从失败中爬起战胜挫折的勇气！

在我看来，成长之路，勇气是必不可少的一个东西。我们干什么事都需要勇气。比如那一天，勇气就让我学到了很多。 那是一个炎热的星期天，我正在家里看电视，突然，我的好朋友来找我。他让我出去玩，我说：这么大热天的，去哪啊?他说：我们去天中广场，等去了你就知道了。我思索了一会儿，说：好吧。走，我们现在就出发。妈妈听了笑笑，说:这么热的天你们要出去啊，来，我给你几块钱，热了好卖冰棍。我高兴极了，走。出发。

我们一会儿便到了天中广场的气象台，我说：来这干嘛啊，他笑了笑，说:你看那边的池塘边上。我看了看，那边有一条窄窄的边，那很窄，却很高，足有1米高。我看了看，说：哎呀，你带我来这里干啥。他说：你看着吧。说着，便走了上去。那一条窄路紧贴气象台，他两手伸开。一步一步挪动着。我说：你真胆大，他说：你也会行的你试试吧。我思考了一会儿，说：好吧。他看我的神情说：韩。只要你有勇气，就一定会成功的。我点了点头，有了一份勇气，说：我一定能行。我战战克克走了上去，脚刚踏上去，勇气就减少了一点。这是我看我的好朋友已经快到头儿了，在心里想，我一定能行，不要害怕。于是，我就开始走。一会儿，便走了半截，我心中的勇气又增加了一点。开始加快速度，一会儿，我一块走到头了。我现在急忙跳了下去，落到了地上。心中顿时平静了下来。我在地上看看池塘里的水，一阵暖风吹来，把我心中刚才的恐惧感顿时没有了。想：我竟然成功了，只要有勇气，就一定会成功呢。我高兴极了，说：走，我们去买冰棍。于是，我和我的好朋友高兴的跑开了。

这件事让我认识了：只要有信心，勇气，就能战胜一切恐惧。任何事情都能办成。也让我感到了：人的生活中处处都能学到东西。

The word, friend, covers a wide range of meanings. It can be a nodding acquaintance, a comrade, a confidant, a partner, a playmate, an intimate colleague, etc.

Everyone needs friendship. No one can sail the ocean of life single-handed. We need help from, and also give help to, others. In modern society, people attach more importance to relations and connections. A man of charisma has many friends. His power lies in his ability to give.

As life is full of strife and conflict, we need friends to support and help us out of difficulties. Our friends give us warnings against danger. Our friends offer us advice with regard to how do deal with various situations. True friends share not only our joys but also our sorrows.

With friendship, life is happy and harmonious. Without friendship, life is sad and unfortunate. I have friends in high positions and friends in the rank and file. Some are rich and in power. Some are relatively poor and without power. Some are like myself, working as a teacher, reading and writing, content with a simple life. We all care for each other, love and help each other. We feel we are happiest when we chat and exchange ideas with one another. With my friends, I know what to treasure, what to tolerate and what to share.

I will never forget my old friends, and Ill keep making new friends. I will not be cold and indifferent to my poor friends, and I will show concern for them, even if it is only a comforting word.

[参考译文]

“朋友”这个词的意义很广。朋友可以是点头之交、同志、知已、伙伴、玩伴、亲密的同事等。

人人都需要友谊，没有人能独自在人生的海洋中航行。我们给人以帮助，也需要别人的帮助。在现代社会，人们更重视关系和联系。一个有非凡魅力的人有许多朋友，他的力量在于他的奉献能力。

生活充满矛盾和斗争，我们需要朋友的支持，以帮助我们摆脱困境。朋友提醒我们警惕险滩。朋友主动给我们以忠告，告诉我们如何应付各种不同的局势。真正的朋友与我们同甘共苦。

有了友谊，生活幸福、和谐；没有友谊，生活变得悲伤、不幸。我有地位高的朋友，也有地位低的朋友；有的有钱有权，有的较穷且无权无势。有的和我一样教书，读读写写，满足于简朴的生活。我们都互相关心，互相爱护，互相帮助。我们觉得朋友们在一起闲谈交流思想时感到最开心。对我的朋友们，我知道该珍惜什么，容忍什么，分享什么。

我决不会忘记老朋友，同时继续结交新朋友。我对穷朋友绝不冷漠，而是关心他们，哪怕只是一句安慰的话。

[我们需要朋友英语作文及译文

在以前的生活中，我只是一个平平凡凡的孩子，我认为，只要紧跟大部队走就不会拉队。可是在现在看来，我当时的想法是错误的，因为在前几年，我是不会比普通同学多做一些事的，因此我对外也很少有交流对外人说话也缺乏自信和勇气，因此产生了孤僻。

但是在几次锻炼的过程中，使我渐渐的学会了与外人交流。

第一次，是在超市的询问。有一次我和同学一起为学校买本子，但本子的数量存在问题，所以我就习惯的让同我一起去的同学去打听打听，谁知她也不想去，并且还让我去问。现在的情况，只有我去了,我试探着去打听这本子的消息，可是这似乎对服务员丝毫没起作用。他不客气的喊了声：“本子就这些，没有多的了！”她的回答令我非常失望。一气之下，我又鼓起勇气，跑到两个服务员的旁边，问她借一电话用用，于是就联系上了杨老师，电话中得知：老师早已定下了本子的数量，于是借给我手机的服务员热心的去帮我找管理本子的服务员，她正在帮我们搬本子哪！

这件事使我大大提高了自己的信心和勇气，从此以后我在同学面前都表现的比较大方、活泼。

第二次，是在图书馆发生的事。我与同学共同完成暑假里需要做的研究性学习中的实践调查问卷项目。因此我和我们小组的同学来到了银座广场的京广书城进行调查，调查万卷总共20份，发起来真不容易，在我们小组里，有个比较好说话的，于是我们决定让他发10张，但是他的能力必定有限，经过好多人的拒绝，他似乎没大有信心了，于是发了5张就坚决不发了，还有剩下的15张呢！只有留给我和另一个腼腆的同学发了。紧接着，目标出现，就坐在我的身旁，我们谁也不想去，但也是实在不想丢掉这么好的目标，因此我的心情平静了一下，鼓起了勇气，装作很大方的样子上前说：“你好同学，请问你上几年级了？”我抱着一线希望（希望他是初中的）他自信的跟我说：“初一啦！”他的回答很让我欣慰。“请你帮我们填一下调查问卷吧。这是我们初中的作业。”我再次鼓起勇气地说。“好的。”“谢谢！”

这一次，我向同学们打了个“ok”的手势，代表我的成功与勇敢，虽说这是一次很平常的对话，但对于当时的我是多么不平常！

[描写生活需要勇气的作文

在人的一生中，都会经历很多磨难，每个人都必须经历这些磨难才能够成长。没有捷径可走。经历人生的悲、欢、离、合后才能领悟到人生的道理。而经历这些磨难大家首先需要的就是勇气。

“同学们，这个星期就学到这，放学!”老师在讲台上宣布到，台下的同学都欢呼起来：“欧耶!放学咯!终于回家咯!”由于上初中后，同学们一个星期才回家一次，所以大家都非常想念父母的唠叨，想念家庭的温暖。终于熬到星期五了，大家都异常兴奋。渐渐的，同学们都走了，班里只剩我和班长了。糟糕了，怎么妈妈还不来啊!“小倩，怎么啦?还不走吗?我的家长来接我咯!我先走啦!你走最后记得关好门窗哦!”班长边说边收拾课本。已经迫不及待的想飞到她妈妈身边了。“恩，你先走吧!我等人。”我冷静的说到。其实心里早已经急得不成样了。滴答滴答。时间过得飞快，天空已经渐渐演变成橙色，太阳不见了。只有几朵云闲来无事在空中飘飘荡荡，我的妈呀!天黑了学校里会不会闹鬼啊!神呀，你可别吓我啊，我小小的心脏承受不起这么重大的打击。心里越想越慌，越想越忐忑。突然脑子闪过一个想法，对!问老师借手机打电话给妈妈不就得ok了么?心动不如行动!说干就干!手忙脚乱的收拾书包，关好门窗，抱着忐忑的心走到办公室里，语文老师呢?语文老师呢?目光匆匆扫过每一个角落。“同学，请问你找哪位老师啊?”身后的人向我肩膀上一搭，“啊!”吓得我尖叫一声。慢慢转过头“呼!”原来是语文老师，被吊起来的心顿时放了下来。“老师，我……”“恩?怎么啦?”“我……”“别紧张啊，有事慢慢说。”哎，怎么退缩了呢?说好的呢。说好要问老师借手机的啊!怎么办?难道又退缩么?我怎么这么没用啊!怎么办，怎么办?“你到底怎么啦?”老师问道，已经来到这一步了，难道又要退缩么?难道我一辈子都这么担小?反正已经来到了。死就死吧!呼，冷静点，别急，慢慢来。会成功的。“老师，我想问你借手机，打个电话给我妈妈。”在自己不断的鼓舞下，一股脑的说了出来。心开始噗通、噗通、噗通。狂跳。“哦。就这么简单?给!”老师从衣服的袋子里掏出手机，递到我的眼前。我打了一串熟悉的电话号码后，传来“嘟、嘟、嘟……”的声音。“喂，你好，请问你是哪位?”耳熟的声音传来。“妈妈，是我啦!你在哪?怎么还不来接我?”“哦，宝贝啊，妈妈在广州这边哦，现在还赶不回来，你还剩多少钱?”“恩?大概，40多吧。”“哦哦，够了，够了，你自个儿打的回去。就这样啦，开车呢，拜拜”“嘟嘟嘟……”我还没来得及反驳，妈妈就挂了电话。断了电话后我懵懵懂懂得站着。眼前陷入了黑洞，心一下子跌下了深渊。天啊!你没开玩笑吧!快来打救我吧!过了几分钟，清醒了过来，面对现实吧!但脑海里一次又一次地浮现出妈妈跟我说过的那则新闻。一名出租车司机贩卖女孩到西安等等，让妈妈来接吧!时间转眼而过，学校都快空无一人了。她该不会不来了吧?哎，我怎么办呢?怎么这么没用呢?走，去试试看去，我可以的。不知不觉间来到了乘坐出租车的地方。腿还在发抖，但也没办法啦!不来都来了!豁出去了!“那个，去岳埔多少钱?”“岳埔吗?上车吧!17”“恩。”慢慢的发现司机走的那条路是正确的，心也定了下来。

付过钱，蹦蹦跳跳地回家了。站在家门口，我再也压抑不住此时此刻我兴奋的心情。

经历了这些后，我懂了人生需要是勇气!你们认为呢?

每一个人都是要经历许多坎坷之后才会成功，在人生坎坷的路途中我们最需要的就是勇气。塞万提斯说：有了勇气便能粉碎厄运。

我喜欢看中华达人秀，从中受到很多鼓舞。曾经看到一位姐姐，她失去了双腿，但依旧勇敢的站上了舞台。事情的是这样的：2008年的那场地震，她家的房子塌了，她自己先从房子里逃出来。后来，她发现爱人还在屋里，就回头去救。她让爱人先逃出去，自己随后就出。正当她往外跑时，屋顶上的砖块掉了下来，压住了她的双腿。从此这位年轻女人的命运就完全改变了。在她的生命里行走、奔跑这两个词就完全消失了。

她的爱人知道她残疾后，就离开了她。刚开始她总是有寻死的念头，但她在周围人的鼓励下，她勇敢的活了下来和命运抗争。又一次，不经意间她看到了达人秀这个节目，看到很多达人就是身边的人，甚至跟她一样有有残疾的人，都怀揣梦想勇敢地走上了舞台。她很想参加，可是怕自己会被别人嘲笑。在家人和朋友的鼓励下，她终于如愿以偿去中华达人秀舞台展示自己的才华。

她上舞台前，安了一条假肢，柱着一副普通的拐杖缓缓的来到舞台中心。一位观众为她端来了一把椅子，扶她坐上。她用自信的微笑和坚强唱出了一首《隐形的翅膀》悠扬的歌声飘荡在上海的夜空，掌声不断地响起……她用歌声告诉人们她很棒的！

人生的道路上，有许多坎坷，我们一定要学会勇敢去面对，你努力了，幸福就会萦绕在你的身边。就如李大钊先生说的那样：走过了奇绝壮绝的风景，才会体会到生活的乐趣。努力吧，朋友们，用坚强的勇气来战胜生活中的困难，那么胜利就会属于你。

[生活需要勇气初一优秀作文

“别说你一无所有。因为，你至少还有勇气活下去。”这句话是着名科学家霍金说的。人总是需要勇敢面对某些人与事物。鼓起勇气法征服，往往迎刃而解。是的，我们的确需要勇气!

《这个世界差点没有奥马》讲述的是一个真实的事件：炎炎夏日，奥马的父亲带着一家人来酒吧消暑。在这片种族歧视还存在着的领土上，一位白人醉汉朝笑并辱骂奥马一家为“野猪群”。在这种情况下，奥马的父亲并没有与其产生争执，而是心平气和地与其讲起一番理来，这醉汉最后竟惭愧地拿出钱来向奥马的父亲赔礼道歉——奥马的父亲面对白人醉汉，面对种族歧视没有退缩，勇气使他克服了这一切困难。

“有心杀贼，无力回天，死得其所，快哉!快哉!”这一短语是戊戌六君子中谭嗣同临死前所吟诵的。从公车上书到百日维新最后到断头台!谭嗣同似乎不知道什么是死。当康有为梁启超在为“留得清山在，不怕没柴烧”逃往国外时，他却甘愿为这场变法抛头颅洒热血，甘愿做第一位为变法流血牺牲的人。面对强权压迫，面对死亡威胁谭嗣同从不低头。无所畏惧的他终将为这场变法而流芳百世，他那十分的勇气也终将成为他孤傲的精神品质!

湖北荆州长江大学，又一次成为人们谈论的焦点。“大学生救小学生，老人救大学生。”在这场救生命与死亡拼搏的过程中，长江大学大一的三位学生用自己花季般的生命挽回了两位小学生稚嫩的生命。当面对死亡的威胁，面对暗涌的恐惧时。是勇气使他们奋不顾身，是勇气使他们成为又一位英雄典范!

勇气是力量眼，是希望：也是动力的源泉：更是精神的支柱，生命的脊梁!当一种种勇气出现时，我们终将会明白一个道理——我们需要勇气!

想要成功，有一颗勇敢的心是必要的，只有有了勇气，你才敢去面对;只有有了勇气，你才敢去面对、承担前方的困难，承担自己的责任，最后才能收获成功。 If you want to succeed, a courageous heart is necessary. Only with the courage, you dare to face it; only if you have the courage, you dare to go to faceWith the difficulties of the ahead, you can take your own responsibilities, and finally you can gain success.

拿破仑，一个小矮子，却成为了欧洲的霸主，如果没有勇气，他怎敢窥视那至高无上的皇位宝座。如果没有勇气，他只会是一个战场还会偷偷逃跑的小士兵;而想要当将军的士兵要有野心，更要有勇气，因为有无数人在窥视将军宝座，你如果退缩一步，便会被无情抛弃;如果坚持，就要与无数劲敌厮杀。你需要巨大的勇气来支持你，才会有机会等上巅峰。

勇气是一个人成功的催化剂，勇敢者总是能更快地走向成功。当然，也不能排除一些没有勇气的人因运气或其他种.种走向成功。但是这些人取得的成功往往都是一些小的成功，而那些大的成功永远是那些勇敢者得到的。像汉高祖刘邦，成吉思汗等等，他们获得的成功绝不是运气，而靠的是在战场上无畏的杀敌，他们都是勇敢者。

勇，不是鲁莽，是有勇有谋，勇敢者和愣头青永远也画不上等号，勇敢者是在有把握或有一丝的把握才回去做这件事的人。而愣头青却是不管三七二十一地想做什么就做什么，所以，勇敢的勇和勇气的勇是有勇有谋的勇。

在学习中，如果连超过在你前面的人的勇气都没有，那你就永远不可能超过他。中考满分作文只有有勇气，有毅力，才能在学习上取得进步。

历史永远是成功者的光荣史，它记载的永远是勇敢者的光辉。所以想让别人知道你的光辉，就要成功，而成功必须拥有的就是勇气。只要有勇气，才敢面对挫折与困难。只有有勇气，才能战胜这些。只有有勇气，成功才会属于你。

未来的世界，是勇敢者的世界。软弱的人只能活在生活的社会最底层。拥有勇气，让成功属于我们;拥有勇气，让我们创造成功。

我渐渐的长大，同时也渐渐的明白生命的无穷力量。有时生命的力量弱小之极，但有时生命的力量也会强大无比。故此，我们要学会弱小而又强大的生命。

中央科教频道《自然传奇》里讲到;非洲草原上的食草动物的幼仔必须在出生后几分钟内学会走动、奔跑，不然就会成为一切肉食动物的盘中餐。

适才出生不久的动物幼仔会在妈妈细心温柔的鼓励下慢慢用其羸弱的小腿支撑起弱小的躯体，然后学会走动、奔跑，妈妈此刻则全神贯注的关注身边草丛里有没有虎视眈眈的嗜血如命的猛兽，以备不防。

我曾听说过这样一则故事;在一个美丽宁静的清晨，在大草原的一端，狮子妈妈告诫小狮子;‘孩子，你如果跑不过羚羊群里跑的最慢的羚羊，你就会被饿死。’

草原的另外一端，羚羊妈妈也在告诫小羚羊;‘孩子，如果你跑不过狮群里跑的最快的那只狮子，你的命运将会死亡。’

于是，在广袤无垠的草原上的同一时间，同一片蓝天下，小狮子和小羚羊同时在练习奔跑。

听完这则故事，我觉得生命是顽强的，为了生命的延续，我们总是拼尽全力。就是动植物都能坚强的活下去，我们人类又有什么不能呢﹖

留不住岁月的脚步，留不住儿时的天真，我跟着时间慢慢长大。一路收获，一路成长

还记得小时候跌倒的情景吗？

那天风和日丽，我在家门口玩耍，突然不小心摔了一跤，磕破了膝盖。妈妈闻讯赶来，看到是一块石头把我绊倒了。妈妈说：坏石子，坏石子害得宝贝摔倒了我扑哧一声笑了，妈妈，石子又没有长脚。是我自己不小心摔倒的。妈妈看了看，是呀，没有说什么。妈妈没有说什么，她只是抚摸着我的头笑了。我忍受着疼痛，鼓起勇气站起来。

成长，需要勇气。跌倒了要有勇气站起来，犯错误了要有勇于承担错误的勇气。

转眼间，我快小学毕业了。在人生前行的道路上，我们或许会遇到很多困难，不知所措。有勇气去面对，就要有勇气征服。不过没有彻底的失败，也没有完全的成功。一切还是需要一种坚持。

成长，需要勇气。成长的路上，充满挑战。我们是否能化险为夷？前方的路是未知的，或许黑暗，但我们要有勇气把握自己的人生，有勇气挑战自己。

成长，需要勇气。磕磕绊绊的经历会让我们的生活更加丰富多彩。

[成长是需要勇气作文

有一首歌是这样唱的“我们都需要勇气，来面对流言蜚语”。是的，人人都需要勇气。我们需要它来面对一切成功与失败，我们需要它来面对一切是与非，我们需要它来面对一切一切的事物。 There is a song that sings "We all need courage to face rumors."Yes, everyone needs courage.We need it to face all success and failure, we need it to face everything and right, we need it to face everything.

自幼我就知道昭君出塞的故事。她的精神一直深深地感染了我。是什么驱使她不顾宫中金银珠宝，锦绣绸缎，舒服奢华的生活，来到环境恶劣，渺无人烟的边塞?这是一个人说做就做的事吗?谁都知道，去了边塞是一去不返的选择，是不可能再回过头来的事了。昭君想过吗?她想过，是什么让她这样做，是勇气!

当年曹操兵败赤壁，狼狈不堪地逃到华容道，但他还是中了神机妙算的诸葛亮之计，而等候与他搏斗的却是与他有过君臣交情的关羽。关羽满骨子里都是刚强与正义。这时，关羽面临了两种选择：一是擒曹操回去，获取功名。二是放掉曹操，回去受罚。而关羽已在军师面前立下了军令状，必须擒曹，否则一死。但是他擒住曹操是违背良心的事，毕竟人心是肉做的，曹操待他不薄，人有情呀!所以，他最终放掉了曹操，回去领死。当他做出选择的这一刹那间，是什么让他这样做，除了他本身的正义，还有勇气。这关系到个人甚至国家安危的事，是需要勇气才能做出来的。

同学们，当你面对一个选择时，你有勇气去选择?去面对吗?当你上讲台在老师同学面前读一篇演讲稿。你有勇气吗?当自愿竞选班干部时你有勇气吗?把你的勇气拿出来吧!每一件事，当你决定要做时，那已是成功了一半，因为你有勇气去做它，你很有胆量。古往今来，有多少件事不是因为有勇气才去做的?可能寥寥无几。小鸟飞过大海，它一定能飞过去吗?那必须要尝试。在尝试之前是需要勇气和胆量的。

每当你做一件事时，把你的勇气，把你的胆量，把你的信心拿出来吧!拥有了这些，你已经站在比起跑线远的地方了。

勇气是人生中必不可少的因素，没有勇气，即使拥有了很多成功的能力，也只是一种徒劳。勇气是在绝望中的再一次挑战，是对自己的一种肯定，是不服输的再一次努力。勇气是那不败的神话，是一种继续的毅力，我们不要在绝望中绝望，挺起最后的一丝力量，哪怕前面是一片洋，或许还是不能成功，但我们努力过，我们不后悔最后的失败。我们因为拥有了勇气而成功。

生活如同一扇扇各种各样的门，如果你想要打开它们，也需要付出代价。呵！大家就是得用你的勇气来作为筹码。

在生活之中，人们往往会逃避，会感到恐惧，而就是因为这些，使人们丧失了最基本的勇气。笑看世界，你会觉得眼前一片万紫千红；隔着泪眼看世界，你会发觉整个世界都在与你一同哭泣。

让我们用最真挚的笑容来面对世界吧！不要伤心，也不要哭泣，因为在你的世界里，总会有一丝光明，而那一丝光明，也就是你的勇气。

敞开心结，笑看人生！相信吧，这样你的生活就无法被悲伤，沮丧，烦恼所无情的侵蚀。不要蜷缩在黑暗的角落，迎向光明吧！因为那便是你最终的归宿。

如溪汇河，河汇湖，湖汇海一般。就算你以前是何等的懦弱，胆小，但只要你拥有勇气，哪怕只有一点点都会让你在黑暗中无所畏惧。所以，你还为什么懦弱？为什么胆小？

把心敞开吧！来寻找属于你的那一份独一无二的勇气！

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

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

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

1.?????? Proverbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Damaging Research

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

3. Education and Citizenship

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

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

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

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

4. The Teacher’s Role

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

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

5. Education Philosophy

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

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

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

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

6. Student Life

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

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

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

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

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

7. Adult Education

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

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

8. Moral Relativism in American

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Schools Should Teach Values

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. College Pressures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why are you going?”

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

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

But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obliged to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.

I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-round person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artist is a “dumb” thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the “dumb” courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in it—and she deserves to follow her muse.

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

“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I could not tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”

The story is almost funny—except that it is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressure put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”

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

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

“Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,” one dean points out, “It’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic work, psychologically.”

Why cannot the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can, and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and does not know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He did not sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. That’s what deans, masters, chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.

To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students do not have as much time to spend. They are also overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their figure nails onto a shrinking profession.

If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.

Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing into themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.

“Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Hortas. “College should be open-ended: at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along. It’s almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist-that they’ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best paying slot.”

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

I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story; if they were so dreary I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.

Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extracurricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.

This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the ‘60s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges, as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.

They also cannot afford to be the willing slave of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one-hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper—who’s past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that “newsies” routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today’s students will one or two articles a week, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I’ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.

If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.

I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell neither them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway products, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.

I asked them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

11. To Err Is Wrong

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

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

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

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B~”

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

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

Playing It Safe

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

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

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

Different Logic

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

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

Errors as Stepping Stones

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

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

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

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

[英语作文写作的需要背诵的部分

我时常躺在草地上，看着微微西偏的太阳。想到我的一生似乎被某些东西在不知不觉中控制着。就好象这太阳，注定了东升西落，周而复始。

我喜欢平淡，但我不甘于平庸。我相信我的青春总有一天会燃烧起明亮的火焰，我在等待。

承认生活中的我并非一个强者。很多时候，我只会等待，却不知道自己去拼搏，去取得。我想：这可能是因为我太过于相信命运吧。亦或是我为了掩饰这种性格而选择相信命运的吧。我不知道……我就这样在糊里糊涂，不明不白中成长。

“爱情需要勇气，来抵抗流言蜚语……“但我没有。在这个世界，过早的喜欢上有个人似乎是一种错误，一种痛苦。对于没有勇气的我们来说，它注定是一场悲剧。

我经常独自一个人跑到我们曾经一起快乐过的地方，轻轻地散步，轻轻地感受那些遗留下来的气息。想着昔日的快乐，不知不觉间我已泪流满面。世事依旧，人世而非，佳人何处，流星难寻。我的心在泣血。

也许，我这辈子注定了忧郁。我是一个矛盾的人，时常因为某些原因做出一些莫名其妙的行为。尔后，就为这些行为造成的后果感到彻底的悔恨。尽管它们并不是很糟糕。但它们让我陷于痛苦与无助之中。我是一个长不大的孩子，很多事情，我还不知道怎么去处理。就好象，朋友送我一个青涩的苹果，我该怎么办这样的问题，我往往需要整个青春去思考。吃掉亦或是扔掉？我总是犹豫不决。吃掉往往会肚子疼，扔掉则会心痛。我害怕自己会后悔，于是在无法抉择中深尝痛苦的滋味。

很多事情，习惯了就好了。太阳已忍受的烈焰周而复始了五千多万年。那么，就让我忍受着我的痛苦，演绎完我平淡但不平庸的一生吧。

生活需要勇气去冒险，去创新。规规矩矩的人，人生定会少了许多精彩；爱冒险的人，虽然人生路上有遭遇许多危险，但他的人生却会充满精彩。

从小，我就是一个爱冒险的孩子。刚开始学会走路的时候，我就屁颠屁颠地在家里乱闯；长大一点，我就在附近的几条小巷子里乱跑，有时候还去别人家“蹭饭”。妈妈没少训我、担心我，不过，我依然“我行我素”，享受着我的冒险，我的精彩。其中，最让我感到自豪的是一年级第一次放学我就自己走回家啦！

记得那一天放学后，我就遵照妈妈之前的嘱咐在校门囗乖乖地等妈妈，可等不到五分钟，急性子的我就开始坐立难安了。我的脑子里像放电影一样播出一幅又一幅妈妈因有事而暂时抽不开身来接我的画面。紧接着，一个大胆的念头跳进我的脑海了——自己走路回家。说走就走，不过，我还从没离家这么远呢！我暗自给自己鼓劲：就当来一次回家大冒险好了！我大阔步走在大街上，一路上东瞧瞧西望望，一会儿边走边踢小石子，一会儿又顺手在路边摘几朵小野花。我一边走一边回忆着妈妈昨天带我来时的路线，想到自己能独自回家，不禁飘飘然了，但一想到路上可能有坏人，心里还是有点害怕。我装出一副司空见惯的样子，好像这条路我从小走到大一样。当妈妈准备去接我的时候，我忽然从门外跳进来，特意在妈妈面前绕了一圈，来了一个闪亮登场。瞧我一脸的兴奋和汗水，可把妈妈吓了一大跳。妈妈一边担心着问东问西，一边又教训我不该乱跑。

从那以后，每当放学的时候，妈妈就准时出现在校门口，因为她怕我又乱跑。而那次“回家大冒险”，也永远留在我心中，成为一段美好的回忆。

在生活中，我们总会面临许多的困难，都需要勇气去克服，因此，勇气是生活中不可缺少的。

有一次，妈妈的同学约她去唱卡拉ok，妈妈欣然答应，她对我说：“妈妈的同学约我去歌厅，一个人在家好好待着，8点钟就上床睡觉。”我一听妈妈要出门，坚决不肯。可妈妈似乎狠下了心，板着一副脸对我说：“不可能，你赶快给我上床去。”我一看情形不对，只好把嘴嘟得老高老高，握着拳头往卧室走去。妈妈帮我关上灯，我躺在被窝里，望着黑漆漆的开花板，胡思乱想着：难道是鬼的眼睛在瞪我?小时候外婆总对我说鬼喜欢捉不睡觉的孩子，难道……我越想越害怕，心砰砰直跳，怎么也睡不着。我安慰自己说：“别害怕，世界上是没有鬼的，快睡吧!我安慰着自己，好不容易才进入了梦乡。第二天一早，妈妈叫醒我，郑重地对我说：“女儿，恭喜你!你的勇气战胜了胆怯，你终于学会独自一个人睡觉了。”听了妈妈的这一番话，我高兴得上前拥抱妈妈。这次，是勇气使我得到了成功!

当然，我也有没勇气的时候。那便是游泳。去年暑假，妈妈从电视年到那些女运动员跳水时矫健的动作，十分欣喜，立刻把我报进了暑期游泳速成玉，我换上泳衣，却站在游泳池旁不敢下水，严厉的女教练将我拉下了水，可我马上就套上自备的游泳圈。虽然，我已在教练的逼迫下学会了憋气，但无论妈妈和教练怎样劝我，我怎么也不肯拿下游泳圈游泳。因此，我至今还不会游泳，看见同学们在水里自由地游来游去，我就只有羡慕的份了。要是我有勇气，我也就能享受在水中的快乐了。

勇气能给我们带来好心情，也能使我们在前进的路上步履铿锵!让我们一起战胜困难，获得勇气吧!

I am not a brave girl, I am afraid of losing face in front of my friends

and parents, so I always let the chance go and refuse to try. Once, I have a

chance to take a performance in the Christmas show, but thinking about if I

performed badly, all my friends would laugh at me, so I gave up the chance. But

now, I am tired of letting so many chances to go, I want to try, after seeing my

friends take all the chances to try, I am not going to be the outsider all the

time, I want to live my own life and make some differences. People say failure

is not terrible, the unforgettable thing are to lose the courage to try and then

making all kinds of excuses. Let’s take out our courage and do what we want to

do.

生活需要勇气

悬崖峭壁上，一棵松树茁壮生长着。没有谁来施肥，没有谁来浇灌，可它依然快乐的生长着。尽管只有贫瘠的土壤，少的可怜的雨水，它依旧顽强的把根扎进岩石缝里，用根紧紧地抱住岩石，凭着勇气克服重重困难，努力地生长着。它是如此珍惜生命，尽管长得并不茂盛，但从不放弃一点儿生存的机会！它的这种毅力和勇气怎能不令我敬佩？我们人类也应该这样，遇到任何困难都要勇敢地面对，只要我们努力地去做，再大的挫折都不怕。

张怡宁，中国乒乓新的女领军人物，她的夺冠之路并非一帆风顺。从1999年到2003年她多次在重大赛事上，连连失利，这些挫折曾使她产生放弃打球的念头，但也正是这些挫折使她越来越清楚的认识到：&ldqu;当技术水平达到一定的高度之后，比赛就不仅是技术更是在比心理！&rdqu;张怡宁正是凭借着勇于面对挫折的勇气，才取得今天的成绩。

可见，在生活中处处都需要勇气。生活就像一望无际的大海，大风大浪总是难免的。每当暴风雨来临时，勇敢的水手满怀生存的勇气，不管风浪多么可怕，他总能坚持下去，最终得以平安归来；而怯懦的水手，早在真正可怕的暴风雨到来之前，就失去了生存的勇气，其航海之旅往往以失败告终。

大家可还记得，在汶川大地震中，有许多的幸存者们都被废墟给掩埋了。可是，他们却凭着顽强的毅力活了下来。是什么让他们有这么大的毅力？是勇气！是勇气让他们如此勇敢的面对死神，是勇气让他们创造了一个又一个的生命奇迹！大家不会忘记，那个&ldqu;可乐男孩&rdqu;的一句&ldqu;叔叔，我要喝可乐&rdqu;，逗乐了整个为这场大灾难而感到悲伤的中国；敬礼男孩的一个敬礼，体现出了人们面对灾难的的勇气。正是这种勇气，鼓励着人们与死神一争高低，坚强的活下去！

可是在生活中，有些人一遇到困难就会逃避。前段时间曾在报纸上看到，有一个大学生，家里很穷，国家帮助他上了大学，但他在学校因受了一点小小的挫折就跳楼自杀了。面对一点挫折，他怎么就那么懦弱，不热爱生命呢？不是有句话说&ldqu;不经历风雨，怎能见彩虹&rdqu;吗！所以说，不管遇到什么事，我们都应该勇敢地去面对，要有生活的勇气。

人生之路曲曲折折，难免遇到坎坷。在困难面前有两种人，因此有了两种不同的选择。一种人选择鼓足勇气，勇往直前；另一种人则是逃避，则是放弃！你会选择哪一种？

我想，答案是肯定的。

[中学优秀作文_生活需要勇气