In his book How Children Fail, John Holt talks about the strategies children have for coping with school. The strategies of most children, says Holt,

I didn’t really get to thinking much about children’s strategies until I had stopped teaching and gone into a few classes to observe as a fly on the wall. Most of what went on in the classroom went completely unnoticed by the teacher. And what the teacher did notice, she seemed often to misunderstand. The children had an amazing variety of strategies which really had the teacher fooled. Some of them had fooled me too, for the years I had been teaching. I thought that if I were to point out some of the strategies which I saw, teachers may begin to look more carefully at their own and their children’s behaviour.