Learning Strategies

We have been working on our current project, a peal of 8-spliced, for a while. We rang our first quarter in November 2012, and since then we've rung several more quarters, and lost a peal a few times. We find it difficult to get together for peal attempts, so we...

A few weeks ago I attended my first module of the ITTS (Integrated Teaching Training Scheme), and while I am not sure I ever gained mastery over the many acronyms floating about, I came away with some interesting ideas, which have some applications to handbell ringing.

The most productive concept...

On Saturday we had another successful Scottish Handbell Day, which Tina will write about soon. On Sunday we had a session of trying to make progress with our 8-spliced project. As we have been out of practice over the summer, rather than going for a peal we decided to ring...

I've been practising with Mabel a fair bit recently, partly because we haven't been doing much real handbell ringing over the summer. Here are some thoughts on how I use it. It would be interesting to hear from other users.

• When Graham John developed his handbell manager software, enabling hand-held...

On one of my trips last year, when looking for something to read on the plane, for a change I browsed the business section of the airport bookshop instead of the fiction section. I picked up a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There, by Marshall...

Among the quarters we rang on the most recent handbell day was one of Plain Bob Major, which was Colin's first quarter away from the tenors. As I often do for Bob Major, I called the standard 720 of Bob Minor (i.e. Wrong Home Wrong 6 times, single Home half...

On Monday we made some more progress with what is becoming our regular 10-bell band, with a peal of Cambridge Royal. We rang Jonathan's new bells, so they have now been properly christened. The peal wasn't perfect by any means, and the speed was a little variable, but it held...

This morning I came across an interesting blog post on productivity, which is titled 'The McDonald's Theory' (there's a link at the bottom of this post).  The theme is how to get started on a project, particularly a difficult, long, or still rather amorphous project.  The conclusion: just start, even...

My main ringing ambition is to be able to ring on handbells everything that I can ring on tower bells. I don't suppose I'll ever get there, although it's made a tiny bit easier by the fact that there are some things that I'll probably never be able to ring...

Yesterday we finally did it: the classic 41 Surprise Minor. We've been going for it, on and off, all year, and sometimes it seemed as if we would never be able to get it. But yesterday, after at least half a dozen false starts (one of them lasting almost an...