Partnerships: conclusion

In this module, we've had eight lessons:

1. What is a partnership?

2. Nature's Best Teams

3. Business partnerships and collaborations

4. Creative partnerships

5. Words that go together

6. Human partnerships

7. Unlikely partnerships

8. Becoming a better partner

Discuss:

Which of these lessons was the most memorable?

What specific details from these lessons do you remember?

Are there any that you've almost completely forgotten about?

quiz time

1. What do we call a temporary alliance of different groups or organisations that unite to achieve a common goal, especially in politics?

2. What noun is given for when two companies become one?

3. Which animal keeps guard and makes a soft, continuous peeping sound so the others know somebody is watching the sky?

4. What is the name of the organism that is made up of a fungus and an alga?

5. What two companies did the Dassler brothers create separately?

6. What was the Warner brothers' 1927 breakthrough - widely regarded as the first feature-length film with synchronised dialogue?

7. Dostoevsky hired 20-year-old Anna because of her professional skill. What was her job?

8. Which legendary guitarist did Quincy Jones bring in to play on Michael Jackson's Beat It?

9. One verb collocates with all of the following: a mistake, a decision, a promise, up for lost time. Which verb?

10. Complete the idiom with the correct verb: ___ the plunge (can you explain what it means?)

11. Carl Rogers believed a therapist should accept the client completely, without judgement. What three-word name did he give this famous concept? (Clue: UPR)

12. Harvard's Jack Shonkoff compares good parent-child interaction to a game with a two-word name borrowed from tennis. What is it? (S&R)

13. Great Ormond Street Hospital redesigned its patient handovers - and cut technical errors by around 40% - after help from professionals in which sport?

14. A famous 2005 "centaur chess" tournament was won neither by grandmasters nor by supercomputers. Who won it?

15. What was the name of the four-line program that won Axelrod's cooperation tournament? (Clue: T4T)

16. Charlie Munger often ended meetings with Warren Buffet by telling him, "Think it over and you'll agree with me, because you're ____ and I'm _____."

3:10

Let's go back to our dear emperor penguins.

Does anyone remember anything about them?

The Huddle

Male emperor penguins incubate their eggs through the Antarctic winter, balancing (1) _______ on their feet for around two months without eating (2) _______ at all. Alone, a penguin would freeze. Instead, thousands of males form a huddle, pressed (3) _______ tightly that the temperature at the centre can reach body heat even (4) _______ the wind outside is deadly. The huddle is (5) _______ static: it moves in slow waves. Birds on the freezing windward edge shuffle along the outside and rejoin at the sheltered side, so everyone rotates through the warm centre (6) _______ the cold edge. No individual penguin is (7) _______ charge. The rotation emerges from thousands of small steps - each bird just trying to get warmer - resulting (8) _______ the penguins sharing the cold fairly.

https://shoez.biz/en/investor-fordert-adidas-soll-puma-uebernehmen/

Adolf and Rudolf Dassler were German brothers who started making sports shoes together in their mother's laundry room in the 1920s. Adolf, known as Adi, was the quieter and more technically minded of the two. Rudolf was more outgoing and focused on sales and business. Their different (1) _______ PERSON seemed to (2) ________ COMPLEMENTARY each other, and their company eventually became successful.

The Dasslers attracted international (3) _______ ATTEND when American athlete Jesse Owens wore their shoes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and won four gold medals. Their business continued to grow, but the relationship between the brothers (4) _______ GRADE deteriorated. The exact reasons for their falling-out remain (5) _______ CLEAR. Arguments over business (6) _______ DECIDE, money and personal issues all appear to have played a role.

In 1948, the brothers finally decided to go their separate ways. Rudolf established a new company, which he (7) _______ INITIAL called Ruda, combining the first two letters of his first and last names. It was later renamed Puma. Adolf, meanwhile, created Adidas, combining his nickname, Adi, with part of his surname.

The (8) _______ RIVAL between the two companies soon became intense. The dispute was not limited to business: it affected the entire town of Herzogenaurach, where both companies were based. Local people were reportedly divided according to which company they supported, and even their choice of shoes could reveal which side they were on.

The brothers never managed to repair their relationship. When Rudolf died in 1974, Adolf did not attend his funeral. Adolf died four years later.

Reflection

How easy / difficult did you find these tasks?

Do you think having previously read these texts (albeit not so recently) helped you to get the right answers?

There's often a gap in the accuracy learners can show in tasks like these vs their accuracy in spontaneous language production. Do you feel like you have that gap?

If I were a (nerdy) student, I'd probably have a separate AI project where I could store all the PDFs of the lessons I'd had. I would ask the AI to to design a program to test me regularly on the content and language I came across in these lessons. Have you ever considered doing something like this?

Are tasks like these at the end of modules a useful reminder of some language, a humiliating experience or something else?

Let's end on a more positive note.

Take a look at the pictures below.

Does anyone recognise them?

The House Call

He met his future wife when she was three days old.

In August 1927, a nurse in the tiny town of Plains, Georgia helped deliver a baby girl called Rosalynn. A few days later she returned to check on the newborn, bringing along her own little boy, Jimmy, so he could peep into the cradle. He was not quite three. Neither family thought anything of it.

Nineteen years later, home from the naval academy, Jimmy Carter took Rosalynn Smith on their first date - and told his mother the next morning that he had met the girl he was going to marry. When he proposed, she said no: she had promised her father, before he died, that she would finish college first. Jimmy waited, asked again, and in 1946 they married.

The marriage lasted seventy-seven years, through a struggling peanut farm, the governorship of Georgia and the presidency of the United States. They called it a "full partnership": Rosalynn sat in on cabinet meetings, which scandalised Washington, and Jimmy consulted her, he said, on every important decision

he ever made. They disagreed often, and loudly - but no argument was allowed to survive the day. And every evening, wherever they were in the world, they read two pages of the same book aloud to each other; if they were apart, they did it by phone.

Losing the presidency in 1980 might have broken them. Instead they went home to Plains and started again, spending four more decades fighting disease and building houses for charity, side by side, into their nineties.

Rosalynn died in 2023, at ninety-six. Jimmy, then ninety-nine, said that as long as she was in the world, he always knew that somebody loved and supported him - and that marrying her remained "the best thing I ever did". He died the following year, aged one hundred, a few miles from the cradle where they first met. Neither of them, by all accounts, would have changed a thing.

Discussion

Had you heard of Jimmy Carter before? Do you know anything about his legacy as president?

In many countries, the leader's partner has an important role to play in public life. Is it the same in your country?

What do you make of their habit of reading two pages of the same book to each other every night?

Jimmy spent hours holding Rosalynn's hand in her final days, reminding her how much he loved her. In his own final days, he repeatedly mentioned that he was "ready to see Rosalynn again". Is that the perfect way to leave this wonderful existence?

Can you think of any other partnerships that can rival this one?