What you practise, you get better at.
At a school with as much music and sport as Pilgrims’, this does not come as a surprise. It is a familiar axiom. But what can be salutary is to remember in quite how many regards this is true. It is not just the realisation of the boy towards the top end of the school who starts to feel the burgeoning fruits of all that time spent on their instrument, refining their passing technique or, indeed, nuancing their brush work in art. Both physically and neurologically, repeated activity builds familiarity, strength and accuracy of action. Muscles strengthen, virtuous cycles build and health (in whatever holistic sense the word can be taken) improves.
Recently, a friend – in very challenging circumstances – experienced the direct benefits of this. Unfortunately, he came an absolute cropper on his mountain bike, despite travelling at little more than walking pace at the time. With his bike disappearing from under him on slippery ground, he found himself the unwitting possessor of a broken shoulder blade, multiple broken ribs, a pierced lung and internal bleeding. The extent of injury was, as you can see, pretty shocking. I’m pleased to say he’s making a remarkably good recovery, directly accredited by his doctors and surgeon to the fact that he is a long-time yoga practitioner. At 60 years old, his core strength significantly mitigated the impact of so much skeletal damage and his lung recovery has been excellent thanks to his decades of breath work.
I suppose the point here is that you never know at what times in life you may find yourself needing to draw on the benefits of the dedicated and conscious practising of skills which, when it matters, will make all the difference.
Commensurately, the ‘practising’ of bad habits – be that engraining the wrong playing technique or, more perniciously, a consistently negative thought pattern – also means we get ‘better’ at those too. Perhaps a bit worryingly for those of us who are parents, these practices can pass to the next generation: how often do you find yourself adopting a thinking pattern (and so reacting and sounding) like one of your parents? How often might you be aware of your own children doing the same?...
And so it follows – from both perspectives – that we must constantly engage with what it is that we are actually ‘practising’ on a regular basis; for, whatever it is, it builds the autopilots to which our bodies and minds default. What we want is a bank of practices that – as for my friend – are going to be our salvation in times of need. (To tie this to our recent considerations of AI for a moment… If we see practice as a process of active engagement repeatedly undertaken, the more we outsource to AI of course, the more we remove the process and active engagement we ourselves actually practise. Caveat emptor.)
This week, I’ve been delighted to see our Year 8s show the benefits of how we structure preceding exam practice by managing their mock exams wonderfully well. Though there are plenty of them who in the past have had to contend with some strong anxieties around exams, they have been calm and purposeful and positive in their undertakings, and every credit to them. The benefits of this path towards an exit set of exams, which entails the practice of sufficient revision and preparation, are reported time and again as alumni hit Year 11, perform strongly with their GCSEs, and realise how incredibly helpful having undertaken the process in Year 8 has been.
As ever, we continue to strive to give all our boys every opportunity to practise that which they can later draw on to their benefit.
May I wish you all a lovely exeat weekend.
Tim Butcher
Headmaster
