Holidays - What Are They For?

Obvious question? Possibly, but the answer's intended to be reassuring.

First, rest. The point of holidays is rest. It's a point that's often lost. There's no point in doing the heavy lifting part of revision if it means you start the next term exhausted and ill. Build in some rest at some stage.

Second, relationships. During term, time can get squeezed. This means young people spend less time with parents, siblings, extended family and non-school friends. Much of what we understand by quality of life comes from these relationships. Holidays are when they should be fed (and that means, teenagers, you should do the washing up more often in holiday time!).

Thirdly, revision (at this time of year). It's no good leaving your revision until a month before the exam. By the time you go back to school, you should have done your learning, because your teachers will be running through the final elements of how to use your learning to perform well in the exams. Work intensively in the holidays, and work a lot. See the next post below for more tips on this score.

So, it turns out that not only is term time about the 3 r's, but so is the holiday: rest, relationships and revision. If you don't have public exams next term, substitute reading for revision, and the same applies.

The Last Lap

So, you are preparing for your last school holiday, before A levels launch you into a more independent world. How can you make the most of this period of time. Here are five simple things which have helped students I have been associated with in the past, and which could be helpful for pupils this year, or for parents. They are probably equally applicable to public exam candidates in Year 12 or 11.

First, remember what the purpose of your revision is. Nobody revises just so that they know more. Nobody revises to fill the time. The purpose of revision is to answer exam questions more effectively. Remember that in every revision session - make it as much question and answer driven as you can - this is more effective and more interesting than trying to learn facts. Work intensively, as you would in an exam, so that you are practising being examined. Practise questions you can’t do, not those you can.

Secondly, be collaborative. I recommend students set a target for the amount of work they are going to do on each day in the holidays, and show their progress against it in a public place in the home. Organise it as a table, and show across the top the days on which you will work, and down the table show one box for each work session, whether that’s an hour, forty minutes or another time period, you intend to complete. Agree the total and distribution as a family, and put a tick in each box as that revision session is completed. If you miss a session on one day, don’t try to catch up, just move on to the next day. This helps family communication - everyone knows how much work is really being done towards agreed targets - and means praise can be used rather than students feeling checked up on, or chased, by their parents.

Thirdly, seek help. Technology means that every revising student in the UK can revise collaboratively without leaving their home. While finding someone else to revise with face to face is good, sometimes Skype, Facetime or the phone helps - you are less likely to distract each other. Use question and answer with someone to break up the day - so that it comes between silent at-your-desk sessions of work. If a topic has six units, prepare a revision lesson for another person on three of them, and get them to prepare the other three topics. Deliver them on Skype with no notes.

Fourthly, be realistic. Don’t set yourself the target of working ten hours a day for ten days. You won’t be able to do it. Don’t listen to others who have told you how much time they have spent revising, revise intensively and effectively towards the goal of answering your exam questions better.

Lastly, while you are doing all this, keep an eye out for what works best, so that next time you have to revise for exams, you can do it even more effectively.

Becoming An Adult?

Last week someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It’s a question that stopped me in my tracks because I haven’t been asked that for some time. In the context in which I was asked, it was a clever ‘getting to know you’ question from someone I was meeting for the first time. But it got me thinking about what we mean by being ‘grown up’ - or ‘adult’.

It’s certainly clear that this is something that we all aspire to from our early teenage years onwards. I can remember longing to be old enough to be adult, and enjoy all the things that that meant. But what does it mean, and crucially what does it mean for young people today? And, just as importantly, what doesn’t it mean?

When I was younger I tended to think that being an adult was about self-determination: I thought that, as an adult, I would be able to choose when to get up (whether to get up) in the morning, what to wear, what I wanted to do. I saw independence as the goal, but it was independence of others’ control of me. When others trespassed into areas that I wanted to control I was resentful, whether the trespass was related to my appearance, to the appearance of my room, to my work habits, or my other choices.

But it’s striking that experience of being an adult is not of the independence that teenagers seek. It’s not of being able to work when we want, how we want, or dressing how we want. To a large extent the way we look, and the way we work, and the hours we keep are governed by conventions, by the desires and needs of other people and by our larger longer term aims.

Adulthood is about knowing when to be smart, and when to be scruffy, it’s about when to get up early, and when it’s reasonable, or wise, to stay up late. It’s been about understanding not only our independence, but also our dependence, and the interdependence we experience with those around us. The simple everyday decisions we make reflect the acknowledgements we make about our dependence, and our interdependence as well as our independence.

So here’s the challenge? How do we talk to teenagers about ‘growing up’? How do they think about adulthood: is it about simply doing what they want? Or is it about living responsibly and constructively within the web of dependence, interdependence and independence with wisdom. And how does this also relate to all the other decisions and habits that we acquire which make up the adult person we are, or are becoming? How will our decisions today influence this person we are, or are becoming?

I think that schools need to teach young people that adulthood is living within the reality of those we depend on, those with whom we interact, those who are dependent on us, as well as our independence, and being able to make decisions which are consistent with our longer term plans, and not just our feelings at any one point in time.  A discussion - about what adulthood is, and what it means for each of us, as well as how to get to it - is one that all pupils should be having with their parents, older siblings, teachers, tutors, houseparents, and any other people whose opinion they respect. I have encouraged our pupils to get involved in this dialogue, with each other, and with those they know already in adulthood.

Random Act of Kindness Week - an Assembly Reflection

Just before half term, it was Random Act of Kindness Week. I spoke against it. It's not that I am not in favour of kindness - I think it's the glue that holds a community together. And I am not against the idea of having a week to promote kindness - on the contrary I think it's an excellent idea.

What I spoke against was the idea was that there is something particularly laudable about a random act of kindness. I encouraged our pupils to think of it as routine act of kindness week. What really ought to distinguish a community like a school as a good place to live, and learn, is the total normality of kind treatment from others. Habitual kindness is, it seems to me, a vital skill. For as long as the kindness requires a particular effort, or a particular initiative, it will take an intentional decision to exercise it.

Most of all this seems to be evident in the other end of the spectrum. There is nothing laudable at all about a random act of unkindness, but worst of all would be routine acts of unkindness.

Our manifesto is for habitual kindness, as a routine.

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.