Time and Practice

If the old adage is true that we need 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, then we are doing our young people a disservice. Consider my hobby: singing in choir — we rehearse may be 2.5 hours a week for 40 weeks in the year — at that rate it will take me 100 years to be an expert! Similarly for Maths or Expression (written or verbal): if students do 3hours (?!) of Maths a day for 5 days a week for a school year of 40 weeks, it will take our students 16 years to master maths: that is, after they have finished a bachelor/undergraduate degree at University. By then, it is far too late. And this calculation assumes it is possible to have 3 hours/day for Maths and Expression each, leaving little room for science, art, music, history, sport or another language.
If we want our young people to succeed in education (and increasingly there is a need for some form of qualification), we need to ensure that things like arithmetic and expression are mastered before they leave high school. In short, we are not giving them enough time to dwell, to think, to play, to memorise (or become so familiar with ideas and facts that they are memorised). It is just not good enough to say, “Oh, you can look it up”, because every new concept from there onwards will be difficult and everything will be a struggle. They will enter adult life with half-trained muscles.
And the brain is a muscle. We accept that our elite athletes must practice and practice their basic skills until these skills are unconscious, like second nature. Basic grammar and simple maths should be instinct as well. That means our students, (and our teachers I daresay), need time. Time to make mistakes. Time to learn what works for each individual. We need to slow down and stop throwing them so many things at once and give them time, to be friends, and make friends, with the fundamentals. When we follow a discipline like this, it trains our mind; changes our awareness and observation and changes the way we think — and that is the true sign of having learnt something: our work view has altered, morphed and re-arranged.