Routine

As we start another new term, I thought I would share with you the first assembly of the year, delivered to the girls this morning.

Welcome back. Welcome to the start of a brand new academic year, fresh as a crisp new exercise book, a blank canvas, an uncharted new diary. I hope you have all had restorative and stimulating summer holidays. Discovered new places, read new books, eaten previously untasted food, made new friends. The summer holidays are a time for exploration, geographical, cultural and intellectual.

The summer holidays are also a time for gloriously silly news stories – great white sharks floating around the Isle of Wight, or crop circles being covert messages from extra-terrestrial beings, but this summer there has been a sad dearth of silly stories. It has all been worryingly serious – from Donald Trump’s unforgivable comments about white supremacists in Charlottesville to North Korea flying a missile over Japan, the ongoing chaos and confusion over Brexit negotiations, and handwringing about GCSE and A Level reforms.

And some pretty outrageous material about women thrown in for good measure. Top BBC salaries were released to reveal that the broadcaster’s male stars were paid more than their female counterparts. James Damore, the former Google employee, who resigned after writing a memo arguing that more men may like coding whereas women generally prefer people to things, and Google’s engineering roles shouldn’t be altered to cater for those differences. Gender gaps, he argued, were down to fundamental biological differences, and nothing to do with sexism. Timely then, I thought, that at the end of this term, as part of our South Hampstead Speaker Series, we are hosting an award-winning journalist called Angela Saini, author of a book called Inferior: How Science got Women Wrong who challenges exactly these sorts of misconceptions.

But away from the media furnace and back to the term ahead. For those of you new to the Senior School, your time for exploration continues as you wind your way around unfamiliar corridors and absorb lots of new names, faces and routines. And for all of you, however familiar you are with 7th Heaven, break time cookies, penguins, and Trinity Walk, there are new things to get your head round. Classes with different people, new teachers, new friends, new topics, maybe even whole new subjects. New extra-curricular activities – the start of the Autumn Term is an opportunity to press the reset button and try new things.

But alongside the excitement of new challenges and opportunities, our brains and our souls (if these are indeed separate, which is a whole fascinating philosophical debate), need the comfort of the familiar. As you learn new timetables and homework schedules and the expectations of new teachers, your brain is on overdrive. Every day is exhilarating but also exhausting. Your brain is working hard to wake up to all the subjects you have forgotten over the past eight weeks. Plenty of studies show that at the start of the academic year, students can suffer a dip in performance. So be kind to yourselves. Your brain will soon be firing on all cylinders again. If you find you have forgotten things, and are hazy about topics you once felt really comfortable about, do not despair. Forgetting and relearning something in the end makes it stick much more powerfully. And each time you revisit it the learning will be that much easier. Forgetting is, I would argue, an essential part of the learning process.

Gradually, after the shock of the new, the soothing rhythms of familiar routines take over as you move on auto pilot from French to Maths to Art without even thinking about it. Routines and familiarity give structure and coherence to our lives. Without them we are like rudderless ships.

There is a saying that familiarity breeds contempt. This is a silly saying. Are you contemptuous of your favourite thing to eat? Do you sneer at peaches, or yawn at cheese, or snigger unpleasantly at ice-cream? Of course not. When you properly love things — or people, obviously — familiarity only breeds contentment. It isn’t just that it’s pleasurable — it’s also anchoring. It places you in the world. This is why hobbies are important. If the world is falling down around your ears, you could fly off to Ulan Bator, intrepidly, but it might be more manageable to read/play an instrument/climb a hill/take the dog for a walk/listen to your favourite music. Familiarity with things and people is what makes us strong and keeps us sane.

To be successful this year all of us will need a good balance between the familiar and unfamiliar. We cannot live our whole lives on autopilot or our brain cells will atrophy. Being able to adapt and break out of our comfort zones is a critical ingredient in academic success. We all need to build intellectual resilience by struggling through a few knotty problems. You might resent some of your teachers from time to time for setting you difficult tasks, but they are doing you a favour. Because if you can overcome the difficulty, it makes you stronger for the next challenge.

But just as important as flexibility and adaptability are strong routines. Examination success is a good example of something that comes from effective routines and habits. And this year’s GCSE and A Level candidates at South Hampstead gained some amazing results, placing us in the top 20 schools nationally. These are incredible achievements, with so many individual stories of grit and resilience.

The start of a new academic year is a great time to think about our routines. The point about a routine is that you don’t have to think about it very much. Every day our brains apparently make 35,000 conscious decisions. What to wear, what to eat, where to go, what to say. By the end of the day, the time all of you are likely to be settling down to homework, your brains will already be exhausted from all this decision making. And it is when you are tired that having good habits is most important. Excellence, the Greek philosopher Aristotle said, is not an act, but a habit. We are what we repeatedly do. What are the things you want to do repeatedly this year? What are the habits you need to establish? Something to think about as we all settle into the new term.

I wish you all a happy start to a successful academic year.

Blog post by Vicky Bingham, Headmistress from 2017 to 2023.