School Assembly - In Response to Charlie Hebdo

People are sometimes critical of our school, calling it a ‘bubble’. When they use that word to describe it they intend it as a criticism. But I am proud of the fact that our school is a bubble. Young people should not be exposed to muggings, assaults, burglaries and other unpleasant life events if it’s possible to protect them. However, the bubble must be transparent: although untouched by unpleasant events, it’s essential that young people are aware of the world, and observant of it.
In that spirit, it’s essential that we talk about events such as those at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday and all that has followed it. All young people (of secondary age) ought to have found out about it via their own news listening, paper reading, website surfing. But how should we respond?

First, we should respond with compassion. Compassion for the bereaved families, compassion for the injured, compassion for those most scarred – whether with guilt, fear or another emotion. How will the Charlie Hebdo employee forced to admit the gunmen to her office at gunpoint recover?

Secondly we should react with a sincere and authentic attempt to understand. What forces drive people to the extraordinary, savage, barbaric acts of this week? Are there social factors which we are somehow tied up in? How can we lead our lives as responsible citizens and voters in such a way as to recognise these forces and seek to improve the lot of any critically disenfranchised, or neglected, groups in our society. This attempt at understanding does NOT in any way justify the actions of terrorists, or indeed of any law-breakers, but it may help society to strike at the root of problems.

Thirdly, we re-iterate our values. In the 24 hours immediately following the assault on Charlie Hebdo, the crowds that gathered in French town squares were moving and instructive. An instinctive restatement of the values of French people was taking place. In our context, we should restate our commitment to free speech; and we should have civilised conversations about where the line lies between free speech and gratuitous offensiveness. In the context of a school, free speech is also important, in transparency, in the reasonableness of the pupils asking ‘Why?’ and in open and unheated discussions of contentious issues, both inside and outside the classroom.

We should also, and most obviously, reaffirm our commitment to the resolution of difference without force. We should remind each other that using force to impose one’s will on others is wrong, whether it is in the queue for a meal, over the remote control for the television in a boarding house, or for the imposition of one’s own views on others.

When and where we perceive injustice or wrongdoing, we should pursue change through political, legal or legitimate methods. In any assembly of young people in a good school should be one or two, or more, pupils who are putting together their vision of public service in politics, in law – maybe as a lawyer, or as a judge, or as a lawmaker in the Civil Service – or in the Police force.

Finally, we should resist any pressure, through the media, or any other source, to stereotype people. The actions of those who have assaulted Charlie Hebdo are representative only of themselves, and it reflects nothing on the French people, or those of Algerian descent, or of Islamic faith that they have done so. To stereotype any of these groups as being terrorists is as offensive as it would be to say that all disabled people are violent in the wake of the Oscar Pistorius trial, or that all Christians are cheats because one famous Christian cheated at international cricket. The creation and sustaining of stereotypes is one of the most destructive forces to any community.

In our reaction to such terrible circumstances, we can reject the values of those inclined to terrorism with such quiet and effective collective force that, far from undermining our version of society, such attacks serve to strengthen it, tragic though their consequences are.

6 Months to Go; 6 Things to Do

Public exam candidates go into the Christmas break with 6 months to go to their exams. It’s not long. For some it’s the same length of time as the interval since their last set of exams; others will have other ways of calibrating the time. Here are six activities which are worth undertaking this far from the exams:

1. Organise files, and catalogue them. Not only should all notes on a particular topic be in the same section of the file, a contents list of each file section is helpful. Summarising the content of a subject topic on one side of one piece of paper at the start of each section is an excellent revision tool to be done now (this is one that should never be left to the pure-revision last phase of learning). In addition, a cover page for the file as a whole, detailing the contents of the file is a good thing - in many subjects a thorough knowledge of the way that the specification is organised can help to contextualise questions.
2. Collate feedback on written work by subject. It can be helpful to try to group all feedback on written work (and on reports if they are available at this stage of the year), to spot patterns. Identify what skills are strong, and which are lacking. Most broadly, the skills might be classified as knowledge, expression of that knowledge, choice of which knowledge to deploy well, ability to analyse (or compute), ability to evaluate/express clear answers and conclusions. These five areas could be scored: sound, needs improvement, could be improved, crucial weakness and so on.
3. Review previous experience of taking exams: what has gone well, what went badly? What natural biases were learned in the experience? Are there tendencies to over-estimate ability and understanding, or under-estimate them? What does this mean for the next few phases of the work?
4. Turn short term memory of the Michaelmas Term’s work in to long term memory. Now is the time to write those revision notes, for two reasons: first, the material should be familiar enough still that the notes will be informed not only by what you have written down, but also some memory of the sights, sounds, amusements, and incidental goings-on which surrounded the learning. Recalling these things (and even referring to them in your revision notes) uses deep memory for academic understanding, and will make them stick.
5. Collaborate: take the time now to form your revision relationships. These could be study-buddies for each subject, or they could be a sibling who will share responsibility for testing, chatting practice answers, bouncing ideas off, or helping with the most difficult technical aspects. Anyone who can help here is a good choice: some students benefit from practising their language oral presentations with their own teddy-bear, but you are unlikely to get much help from this source for your Maths A level.
6. Have a rest: make sure that the return to school in January sees you at your peak. Don’t waste week 1 re-acclimatising to the routine of getting up at a certain time to get to school. You’d never approach being an athlete, or an interview, like that. Make sure that you are in the best place you could possibly be to take advantage of lesson 1 in 2015.

Remembrance Sunday Sermon - edited highlights

This was the sermon on Remembrance Sunday 2014 in the Chapel of an English boarding school. It is verbatim, with the exception of local references which would be meaningless or puzzling to the reader from further afield.

The first conversation I can remember with someone who had actually fought in a war was in Tiberias, in Israel, during my gap year where my boss, who had grown up in North London and was, poor fellow, a fanatical Spurs supporter, told me about his experience fighting in the 1984 war between Lebanon and Israel. Tony had been in the first group of Israeli soldiers dropped at Beirut airport who had captured it and then held it for three days until the ground forces had caught up with them. Although I haven’t seen him since then, he would now be in his mid 60s. His experience was that war was a sequence of encounters in which one either died, or was killed. He preferred to kill others than to die himself. But he had no political commitment to his cause: he never spoke about whether the war was right, merely about surviving, and that made a profound impression on me. He was keen, when we talked about it, to impress on me that war was really very unpleasant indeed, and should be avoided at all costs. Avoided, at all costs. Hold onto that.

Those who have fought in wars tend to have very vivid, deeply held memories of them. Very few people  simply forget the conflicts they have been involved with. The events and memories are seared into them. Our remembrance should always start with the understanding that conflicts hurt people, and they go on hurting people for a long time. Conflicts start easily, but take years, sometimes generations, to overcome. Because long after a conflict is over, enmity remains. Making war is only the first part, making peace is much harder.

There’s been a great deal of focus on Remembrance this year - because, as I am sure you are all aware, it is 100 years since the Great War, WW1, started. This was the war which, it was commonly agreed at the time, was ‘the war to end all wars’. A war so brutal, so savage, so appalling in every way that every participant hoped that it would be a sufficiently terrible reminder that no one would go back to war.

The saddest thing about the sacrifice of those who died in WW1 is that, just 21 years later, the world entered another war. And after that Suez, Vietnam, Falklands, Iraq1, Iraq2, Afghanistan, and others. All those conflicts took place before the last of the UK’s trench infantrymen from the Great War died.

I don’t think this country has always done remembrance well. 100 years on gives us the chance to reconsider how we do remembrance - what it is for. I think that Remembrance is about honouring those who fought by asking afresh what we can learn from conflict; how we can honour the dead and the wounded by changing the way that we live. And I think that remembrance can actually be the enemy of reconciliation if it is done less than well, but it can be the agent of reconciliation if it is done right.

Why is the biggest grudge match of a tournament for the England football team the game against Germany? Why is this more impassioned than a game against France, or Italy, or Spain, or the USA? In the context of local derbies, the game against Wales or Scotland ought surely to be more impassioned. But the tabloid newspapers in this country prepare for a game against Germany in a completely different way, and often an inappropriate one in my view.

Remembrance ought to be about how awful conflict, enmity and aggression are. How little is gained from war, and how much is lost. How we tend to underestimate the suffering it produces and overestimate the gains.

The passage that was read to us earlier included these words:

And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled ...

What does remembrance teach us most of all? Within a Christian ethical paradigm, in a Christian country, the most important thing about our remembrance is reconciliation. I want to go further than this: if we do not learn about the importance of reconciliation, of peace, of the desperate, urgent need for humans to learn to live at peace with each other… if we do not learn these things, we do not value, learn from, or remember with honour those who have fought for us. Their sacrifices were made not so we could live in war, but in peace! How do we honour the sacrifice of our former pupils in these wars? We do so by celebrating, protecting, cherishing the peace that they died to obtain for us. By being people who live in peace with each other.

And, in our school there are those who can trace their ancestry back to the countries which the UK fought against in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. We are incredibly fortunate to have people in our school community with strong allegiances to Spain, France, Argentina, Germany, Italy, Japan, and other countries. Our role is to relate to each other in a way that builds a future of peace and human flourishing, together. This school is a community of people from lands and peoples that have been at war, but now choose to live in peace.

I haven’t explained why I think the sacrifice of those who fight in wars is best honoured by by reconciliation. And I cut short the reading earlier. It actually goes like this: 

We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

I am sure that you are all familiar with the Christian theology of the cross. Jesus endured conflict in the form of a beating, a whipping, the exhausting hard labour of carrying his cross, and being crucified,.  All this was in order to bring reconciliation between people and God, and to bring reconciliation between people and people. When humans endure conflict to bring peace, to bring reconciliation, Christians see those people as treading in Jesus’ footprints. Submitting oneself to suffering which leads to reconciliation is deeply Christian. It is what Jesus Christ did. It follows his example closely.

So, I challenged our school community: will we be people who suffer, who toil, who labour for reconciliation, of people to God, or people with other people? Will we imitate Jesus Christ by being willing to suffer for this noble goal? Will we show the same sort of willingness to put ourselves in  a difficult or disadvantageous position to bring reconciliation like all those among our school's former pupils who died in the 20th Century's wars, including one awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery? Will we be God’s ambassadors with a message of reconciliation as St Paul asks in today's reading. I hope so. Because even just a few of today's pupils, who have such good opportunities to be leaders of tomorrow's world, could make such a difference.

So whether you are from Bath or Bristol, Somerset or Gloucestershire, England or Wales, the UK or the rest of Europe, Europe or the rest of the world.. however local you are, or however distant, however like each other, or however unlike, our permanent, enduring, important remembrance of those who died is to live peacably, and be agents for peace in our world. By doing so we honour those former pupils who died in Iraq, and in the World Wars, and we honour Jesus himself.

There is no higher calling. I urge you be reconciled - to God, to each other. And be people who reconcile others, and work for reconciliation, and for peace.

How To Work Hard Without It Being Hard Work

As we get older, we usually become more aware of the way in which we are governed by our habits. The thing about a habit is that, especially when young, we don’t really notice them: I can remember first having the opportunity to see myself standing in front of an audience filmed on (as it was in those days) videotape. There were all sorts of mannerisms and nervous tics that I had no idea I was doing. It was a revelation.

We all have habits, and we hardly notice them. But here’s the thing: whatever it is, a habit takes no effort; it happens instinctively, without will, without moral choice and it does not require willpower. The person who nervously runs their hand through their hair probably uses a fair few calories a day with the effort of doing so dozens of times an hour. For others of us, on the other hand, doing so would require a very great deal of effort - effort to remember to do so, and effort to execute the action. 

Since we have habits we are not aware of and what we do habitually doesn’t take effort. Our habits are worth some attention. 

Much literature suggests that, if you do something for 3 months, ie one whole school term, it becomes a habit. In the context of our whole lives, powerful habits take a short time to be established, and once formed can be exercised without any thought or effort. (Those who have driven from one place to another on autopilot will especially know what I mean).

I am willing to bet that, at some stage, every single reader of this blog has made a resolution to work harder. I have. And I am willing to bet that every single reader of this blog who made a decision to work harder thought that working harder would be harder work. It makes sense doesn’t it. But that’s wrong.

I have suddenly, and recently, realised - and it’s taken me 46 and a half years to figure this out - that working harder is only harder work during the period of time that it takes to become a habit. That’s why you can work harder now than you did 5 years ago without really noticing - unless you stop and really think about it.

So here’s the thing? What’s stopping those students at school or university who need to work harder from doing so? Surely the idea that it will be harder work forever. But it won’t be. It will only be harder for the period of time that it takes for the harder working pattern of behaviour to become a habit. After that it will just be … normal.

If students thought it only took 3 months hard work to be able to work harder for the whole of the rest of their lives, wouldn’t that make it worth them trying? If they thought that 3 months hard work would give them a headstart over the whole of the rest of the world’s population, they’d do it. If anyone really believed that working harder for 3 months would give them a headstart over the whole of the rest of the world’s population, you’d do it.

So why are some students not that hard working: surely it’s because they don’t realise that all they have to do is turn harder working into a habit.

If any of us were to say to students-well-known-for-their-economy-with-effort that we wanted to talk to them about their habits, they’d probably have thought that we  were referring to their tendency to pick their nose, or to send texts while someone was talking to them. We all tend to think of our habits as being bad habits: but what if we were all to take our ability to form habits and turn it to positive outcomes. 

To any student readers of this blog, therefore: find a positive habit, practise for 3 months, and turn harder, or smarter, work into a habit, and you will be able to work harder, or smarter, as a habit, without extra effort for years!

And educators: all we need to do is to encourage our students (and each other) to establish a beneficial habit for three months…

Have YOU Made A Good Start To The Year?

It's a good time to have a first checkpoint of the year. For us, 24 days of the term gone. I estimate that, in our school, most exam year groups are going to have about 1000 lessons between the start of this term and the start of their exams. So far they have had about 130 of these. By the end of this week, it'll be 15% through the year. So, I challenged them this morning - "How have you done so far?"

A few years ago, a former pupil came to speak to our teachers about what he had learned from winning two Olympic Gold medals which could be applied to what we do. One of the things he referred to was this: at the end of every day of training, their coach would take the crew to one side and they would talk about their day’s training. Every day he would ask them, has today been a 'gold medal day'? For four years, they would ask that question every day. They believed that it would take gold medal commitment every day to gain a gold medal at the end of four years.

Now most pupils aren't planning towards a target four years ahead, although some may be. For the moment, it's worth looking ahead to the end of this year. Maybe a pupil has targeted a clean sweep of A and A* grades at GCSE. Has the first 24 days been A/A* in quality? Maybe the target is a distinction in Grade 8 of a musical instrument? Has the first 24 days’ music practice been grade 8 with distinction standard? Or a sporting goal: a certain time in the 200 metres - has the training thus far been consistent with that goal. Or it might be three A grades at A level - have the first 24 days been AAA standard.

For those that have managed this, I encourage them to reflect with satisfaction, but also to consider that the good start will be wasted if it isn't built on, because merely to start well is not to do well at all.

For those who haven’t managed to make a start in line with their long term goals: change NOW! Don’t change tomorrow, and don’t leave it until next week. A change tomorrow is half as likely to be put into practice as a change today. If any students get to this stage of the school year and have not started in tune with the goals they have set yourself, the easiest and best time to change this is right away. The longer any of us practice not working in a distinction, or AAA or all A* and A way, or whatever the target we have set yourself, the better we will get at working in a way that will not deliver our goal. 

And, if one doesn’t know how to work in a way that is consistent with our objectives, we must ASK. 

So I encouraged our whole school community to use the question ‘Has it been a gold medal day?’ as a shorthand for the more difficult and more nuanced idea of whether today has been a day in which our attitudes and approach have been consistent with our long term objectives.

And finally, it's worth considering whether our effect on others is to make them have a gold medal day, or to prevent them from doing so - because gold medals are often won in teams, or crews, rather than individually. Even when the medal looks as if it's an individual award, there's nearly always a team behind the medallist, who made it all possible.

Have I had a gold medal day? Have you? Questions worth asking. Every day.

The Power of Expectations

What are you expecting this year? This is the key question I asked our pupils this morning. I suggested to them that there is evidence to suggest that, whatever one is expecting, one is likely to be right. Those who expect good things tend to put unexpected failures down to bad luck, and see successes as reflective of their ability, and those who expect less good things tend to put their successes down to luck, and see less successful results as being reflective of their ability.

It’s tremendously important at the start of the school year that pupils have high expectations - to understand what they are being taught in Maths, to do well in English, expect to be able to play the pieces their instrumental teacher gives them, to beat the opposition at rugby or hockey, to be able to learn their lines for the school play, expect to better their opponents at the Model United Nations, and so on.

The power of expectations was clear in the last football season. For decades teams had gone to Manchester United’s ground expecting to be beaten, and hoping for a draw. With a new manager, and a new set of circumstances, at Old Trafford, teams turned up not expecting to be beaten, and playing to win. As a result, many did win, and more managed to draw. So the difference between Manchester United and the rest of their league was reduced by a reassessment of expectations.

Similarly dancers, and sportsmen and women give a lot of time to visualising themselves being successful so that it becomes their natural expectation. Because doing so makes them more likely to achieve their goals.

However, and I think it is a big however… a great deal, it seems to me, of a healthy and wholesome approach to life is to be able to hold two different, sometimes contradictory, concepts in balance. Some readers may be thinking that if all one does is expect success and good things that might make one complacent. We all know people who expected to be able to play a piece of music in a concert, or pass a vocab test, or their Driving Theory test, or beat the opposition, and failed because they were overconfident.

And so, as well as expecting to be do well this year, I encouraged our pupils constantly to reinforce a ‘growth mindset’ - that hard work will enable them to do what they want to do. I exhorted them to expect great things, and work their socks off for them. To be optimistic, but not complacent or arrogant.

'The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it but that it is too low and we reach it’. So said Michelangelo. Aspiration, high expectation, huge hard work to achieve it. To any pupil readers of this: I encourage you to set lofty targets, and make this a year where you strain every sinew to achieve them, whatever they are, and where possible encourage others to achieve their ambitions too.

Learning From The Chimp

I have recently been struck by the number of books in a relatively new genre, the latest of which is is The Chimp Paradox, written by Dr Steve Peters, the psychologist behind the British Olympic Cycling Team, the Sky cycling team, and Liverpool FC.

Peters describes the human brain as having two competing systems. First, the limbic system, which Dr Peters calls it your ‘chimp’, (a primal system which serves to keep you alive and away from the bottom of the food chain), and second the frontal lobe where many thinking and decision making functions have their origin (the ‘human’ in Peters’ lexicon). The chimp and the human brain vie for supremacy in each of our skulls.

This is what nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is at the end of a remarkable career as a behavioural psychologist investigating human behaviour and the unconscious influences on it - often coming from the chimp, or ‘system 1’ brain.

Kahneman and Peters concede that both parts of our brain are useful, but Malcolm Gladwell, another of the authors in this area, points out in Blink, ‘system 1’ is what enables a firefighter to use all their experience to say ‘this fire just doesn’t feel right’ and pull all their firemen out of a building before it collapses. ‘System 1’ is what we use when we meet someone when we are trying to decide whether to trust them, and helps us to make accurate quick judgements of character.

Sometimes, of course, we use the ‘chimp’/’system 1’ when it isn’t useful: when we explode with anger about something trivial, when we react emotionally and disproportionately, when we lack perspective. This might be because someone has invaded our animal territory, and we are actually trying to defend it. Because ‘system 1’ is instinctive, we can also use it sometimes without realising it.

One of Kahneman’s experiments relates to  a workplace honesty box for donations towards the cost of coffee, tea and other refreshments. He found that a poster of a human face looking directly out of the picture were put in the room, people would put more in the honesty box. This is ‘system 1’, or our ‘chimp’, making people instinctively do something which is actually irrational.

A key part of our learning as people as we get older is which system to use for which decision. For example which is better for choosing a university: ‘system 1’ - the ‘chimp’ - which goes on feel and intuition, or ‘system 2’, which analyses all the costs and benefits of different courses and different locations. Which might be better if we are deciding whether or not to buy a pair of shoes? Which might be better in deciding whether or not to go out with a boyfriend or girlfriend?

You can use both the ‘chimp’ and the ‘human’, ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’, to make a decision too.

Perhaps education should involve more opportunity to reflect on these issues, so that experience of decision making can be used to improve young people’s capacities in these areas.