3 . So many of us are terrible at being terrible. As our children venture off to school, sports, dances and music lessons, we urge them: Just try something, keep practicing, you’re only a beginner. And yet, faced with our own failure, we become less confident, and quit altogether.

Images of perfection fill our social-media feeds, along with advertisements assuring us we wouldn’t be so _______ if we just bought this thing or tried that product. Parents often add to the pressure, _______ their kids will end up sliding down the socioeconomic ladder.

What if we’re _______?

“It’s such a _______ not to have to be good,” says Karen Rinaldi, who refers to herself as a horrible surfer. After 20 years on the board, she is still bad, and she loves it. There is the excitement of being out on the water, but there is also the _______ of not having to be the expert, the freedom to _______ help and rely on others in a way she never would at work. Back on land, she says she is more understanding and _______others’ mistakes. “The benefit of not _______ myself every day,” she says, “is that I get to surf every time I want.”

Ms. Rinaldi, whose experience led to a book about what you can learn from failure, recommends asking yourself: “What is it that you’ve always wanted to do or try but were too _______?” Whatever it is, she says, start doing it. Should you struggle, ________ the fact that you’re a beginner. “Go in there with the ________ to say, ‘I’m new,’” she says. “People want to help you learn. It makes them feel good.”

Take myself as another example. I started yoga lessons this summer. When I ________ Syd Schulz, a professional mountain biker, that I was terrible at the poses, her response was “what did you expect?” “It’s a little ________ to people who have spent years and years of their lives acquiring skills to think that you should have those overnight,” says Ms. Schulz. Years spent working on her cycling have taught her that improvement often comes in ________ steps, following long stretches of inactivity or even getting ________.

9 . As school starts this fall in Tununak, a tiny Eskimo community of Alaska, Teacher Ben Orr is planning to invite elderly storytellers into the classroom so his young students can learn and then write down traditional legends and knowledge of their disappearing culture. For Donna Maxim’s third-graders in Boothbay, Me., writing will become a tool in science and social studies as students record observations, questions and reactions about what they discover each day. In Eagle Butte, S.D., Geri Gutwein has designed a writing project in which her ninth-grade students exchange letters with third-graders about stories they have read. This year a few of her students will sit with Cheyenne women who tell tales as they knit together, their tradition becoming materials for today’s young writers.

Although these teachers are separated by thousands of miles, their methods of encouraging children to write spring from a common source: the Bread Loaf School. There, near Vermont’s Middlebury College, grade school and high school teachers give up part of their vacations each summer to spend six weeks brainstorming, studying and trading experiences as they try to design new methods of getting their pupils to write. Says Dixie Goswami, a professor who heads Bread Loaf’s program in writing: “We have nothing against ‘skill-and-drill’ writing curricula, except that they don’t work.” Instead, Bread Loaf graduates have created one inventive program to work together to cultivate student writers.

The Bread Loaf literature and writing program began in 1920 as a summer resort where English teachers studied for advanced degrees. Until the late 1970s most were teachers from schools for the upper class. Bread Loaf “was failing in its social responsibility,” says Paul Cubeta, a professor who has directed the program since 1965. “So we went looking in rural America for potential educational leaders.” Foundation funds were raised to help bear the cost for tuition and board. Over the past ten years nearly 500 rural instructors have studied there.

Many of the new ideas teachers took away from Bread Loaf seemed in danger of fading back home, remembers Cubeta. “We need to devise a way for them to go back with support for their projects and for each other.” One result was an idea called BreadNet: by setting up a network of word processors, Bread Loaf-trained teachers could instantly connect their classrooms.

10 . In February 1970, a group of activists gathered in Vancouver, Canada to discuss a planned nuclear test on the Alaskan island of Amchitka. They eventually agreed to sail to the test site and _________ against the explosion in person. At the end of the meeting, the chairman raised two fingers to the room and shouted “Peace!”. After a brief pause, one young attendee _________ with a monumental line: “Let’s make that a green peace”. The group were so _________ the phrase that they named their first boat the Green Peace.

Over the last 50 years, the _________ movement has become so closely associated with the colour green that it’s almost impossible to see a green poster, label or recycling bag without thinking about our planet’s future. But though that connection is the product of a very recent crisis, its _________ go back some way. We have _________ green with nature and its processes for thousands of years. Indeed, the very word “green” comes from the ancient Proto-Indo-European word ghre, meaning “grow”.

The human species, which emerged in the green forests and grasslands of Africa about 300, 000 years ago, has a special _________ link with green. Our eyes might even have _________ specifically to see the green in plants. Unlike most animals, who are red-green colour blind, we humans developed a third cone cell, an additional photoreceptor enabling our _________ to spot ripe red and yellow fruits against a backdrop of green leaf, and to distinguish different green leaves from each other. In daylight conditions, human eyes are more ____________ to green than any other colour.

With the rise of farming, we started to use green as a(n) ____________ for nature and its processes. Archaeologists have recently found an extraordinary store of green jewels in the Levant, ____________ some 10, 000 years. The researchers believe that these objects, many of which had come from hundreds of miles away at great cost, were chosen because they ____________ young leaves and might have been used by early farmers to pray for rainfall or fertilise crops.

The ancient Egyptians, who were farming the banks of the Nile from about 8000 B.C., ____________ use green as identification for their crops. Egyptian painters often represented their god of ____________, Osiris — who was responsible for flooding the Nile’s banks, filling the soil with nutrients and pushing the first green shoots up through the fields — as a bright green being.