Exercise 1: Read the following text and make notes.

How Children Fail

Most children in school fail.
For a great many this failure is avowed and absolute. Close to forty per cent of those who
begin high school drop out before they finish. For college the figure is one in three.
Many others fail in fact if not in name. They complete their schooling only because we have
agreed to push them up through the grades and out of the schools, whether they know
anything or not. There are many more such children than we think. If we 'raise our standards'
much higher, as some would have us do, we will find out very soon just how many there are.
Our classrooms will bulge with kids who can't pass the test to get into the next class.
But there is a more important sense in which almost all children fail: except for a handful,
who may or may not be good students, they fail to develop more than a tiny part of the
tremendous capacity for learning, understanding, and creating with which they were born and
of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives.
Why do they fail?
They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.
They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious
adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads
like a cloud.
They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so
dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence,
capabilities, and talents.
They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them in school makes
little or no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever
has any relation to what they really know - to the rough model of reality that they carry
around in their minds.
How does this mass failure take place? What really goes on in the classroom? What are these
children who fail doing? What goes on in their heads? Why don't they make use of more of
their capacity?
This book is the rough and partial record of a search for answers to these questions. It began
as a series of memos written in the evenings to my colleague and friend Bill Hull, whose
fifth-grade class I observed and taught in during the day. Later these memos were sent to
other interested teachers and parents. A small number of these memos make up this book.
They have not been much rewritten, but they have been edited and rearranged under four
major topics: Strategy; Fear and Failure; Real Learning; and How Schools Fail. Strategy
deals with the ways in which children try to meet, or dodge, the demands that adults make on
them in school. Fear and Failure deals with the interaction in children of fear and failure, and
the effect of this on strategy and learning. Real Learning deals with the difference between
what children appear to know or are expected to know, and what they really know. How
Schools Fail analyses the ways in which schools foster bad strategies, raise children's fears,
produce learning which is usually fragmentary, distorted, and short-lived, and generally fail
to meet the real needs of children.
These four topics are clearly not exclusive. They tend to overlap and blend into each other.
They are, at most, different ways of looking at and thinking about the thinking and behaviour
of children.
It must be made clear that the book is not about unusually bad schools or backward children.
The schools in which the experiences described here took place are private schools of the
highest standards and reputation. With very few exceptions, the children whose work is
described are well above the average in intelligence and are, to all outward appearances,
successful, and on their way to 'good' secondary schools and colleges. Friends and
colleagues, who understand what I am trying to say about the harmful effect of today's
schooling on the character and intellect of children, and who have visited many more schools
than I have, tell me that the schools I have not seen are not a bit better than those I have, and
very often are worse.
(How Children Fail by John Holt, Pitman, 1965)

Exercise 2: Read the following text and make notes.

Coffee and Its Processing

The coffee plant, an evergreen shrub or small tree of African origin, begins to produce fruit 3
or 4 years after being planted. The fruit is hand-gathered when it is fully ripe and a reddish
purple in colour. The ripened fruits of the coffee shrubs are processed where they are
produced to separate the coffee seeds from their covering and from the pulp. Two different
techniques are in use: a wet process and a dry process.
The wet process First the fresh fruit is pulped by a pulping machine. Some pulp still clings to
the coffee, however, and this residue is removed by fermentation in tanks. The few remaining
traces of pulp are then removed by washing. The coffee seeds are then dried to a moisture
content of about 12 per cent either by exposure to the sun or by hot-air driers. If dried in the
sun, they must be turned by hand several times a day for even drying.
The dry process In the dry process the fruits are immediately placed to dry either in the sun or
in hot-air driers. Considerably more time and equipment is needed for drying than in the wet
process. When the fruits have been dried to a water content of about 12 per cent the seeds are
mechanically freed from their coverings.
The characteristic aroma and taste of coffee only appear later and are developed by the high
temperatures to which they are subjected during the course of the process known as roasting.
Temperatures are raised progressively to about 220-230°C. This releases steam, carbon
dioxide, carbon monoxide and other volatiles from the beans, resulting in a loss of weight of
between 14 and 23 per cent. Internal pressure of gas expands the volume of the coffee seeds
from 30 to 100 per cent. The seeds become rich brown in colour; their texture becomes
porous and crumbly under pressure. But the most important phenomenon of roasting is the
appearance of the characteristic aroma of coffee, which arises from very complex chemical
transformations within the beans. The coffee, on leaving the industrial roasters, is rapidly
cooled in a vat where it is stirred and subjected to cold air propelled by a blower. Good
quality coffees are then sorted by electronic sorters to eliminate the seeds that roasted badly.
The presence of seeds which are either too light or too dark depreciates the quality.
“Coffee Production” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition (1974).
Exercise 3:

Strategic planning is typically thought of in terms of how large businesses and nations design
a plan of action to accomplish their specific goals -- but it is a fabulous tool for individuals as
well. If you find yourself disappointed by your life, consider taking a look at how
strategically you are living it.
Some people worry that being strategic is about being manipulative. Certainly there is a fine
balance between passivity and trying to live life according to the "my way or the highway"
approach to influencing the course of events. I think of being strategic as actively engaging in
shaping and directing your life. It is about being thoughtful, careful, and purposeful -- the
antithesis of simply drifting along being caught up in whatever situations and circumstances
you happen to bump into in the course of your life. Strategic living means being smart
enough to embrace the opportunity of playing an active role in determining what you are
creating, promoting and allowing in your life.
If you were investing in a business, wouldn't you want to know that it was being run by
individuals who were well versed regarding the opportunities and challenges they faced?
Wouldn't you want them to use their resources (people, money and time) in such a way that
they maximized the company's short- and long-term return on investment? Most likely, it
would be important to you that these returns be measured not just in terms of money, but
relative to such other factors as alignment with the company's mission, and their commitment
to such values as integrity, social consciousness and the quality of their relationships with
employees and other stakeholders.
Now, let's apply this thinking to how you assess your own life choices. Being strategic is
about getting off autopilot behaviour and being thoughtful about the choices you make in
your life. It means living within the context of having a good understanding of who you are,
what matters to you, and what resources and options you have available.
As a life coach, I work with this perspective as a means of increasing my clients' self-
awareness, wellbeing, enjoyment and creative self-empowerment. Making thoughtful and
strategic choices about how you live your life can have an enormous impact on your level of
satisfaction and enjoyment.

There are three fundamental, on-going, and interrelated activities involved in strategically
living your life. They are: creating a plan, keeping track of results and altering your course
based on those results and the unanticipated surprises life brings your way. A good strategist
needs a great sense of humour and an appreciation for the power of the unknown because no
matter how thoughtful and thorough your planning techniques, life will throw you curve
balls. It's humbling, but the alternative of having no plan means being at the effect of your
life rather than being an active participant and driving force.

Our lives tend to be very complex and to include conflicting priorities and demands on our
time. A seasoned life strategist is like a juggler trying to simultaneously stay on course with
specific plans for each major aspect of his or her life. For example, you might have plans for
your spiritual life, family, career, finances, etc. For a novice planner, I suggest picking the
one area of your life where you are experiencing the greatest challenges and starting there. As
you stabilize one area of your life, develop a plan for another aspect and learn to develop skill
in making the trade-offs that are necessary between the various aspects of your life.