Ringing Forums

I never said it was, I said it was common practice — John de Overa

What I read was: ‘Yes we do, it's understandable as it's the easiest way’.
I wasn’t just talking about ‘putting right’, which is quite late in the instruction process.
However, when putting people right it shouldn’t be what’s easiest but what’s most likely to be effective, see 12.2e at: https://jaharrison.me.uk/thb/12-2.html#12-2

I agree. A lot of problems people have trying to ring methods aren’t to do with the methods themselves but with not being able to execute the required manoeuvres with minimal thought. To use a driving analogy they can’t focus on the navigation, or even being aware of where they are, because they can’t make the car go round a corner when they want, and spend time looking for where the clutch pedal is.
Driving has to become second nature before you can effectively navigate round an obstacle course.

This is where the bandwidth thing comes in. Before starting you need to know the method well enough that recall isn't taking up the majority of your thinking capacity. You also need to get ahead of the game so you are thinking about what comes up in the next few blows rather than thinking about what I am doing now. Once you have this capacity then there is space to think about other useful things like what order the bells are going to come at you, what is the treble doing, can I get my handling just right, how does the (whole) change sound, what rhythm are the back bells setting and do I fit into it, etc. — Jonathan Frye

My ringing teacher would frequently look at me after I crashed out and say "You've run out of brain again, haven't you". She was dead right. The more time I've spent ringing the slower everything appears to have got - it hasn't of course, I've just got better. The people in our tower starting to ring methods talk about this frequently, "situational awareness" is mentioned a lot, shorthand for what you describe.

All of that is a lot to think about and its impossible to do at first. But bandwidth is a trainable skill, you can effectively increase your "processing speed" which gives you more capacity to think about more at once. — Jonathan Frye

Yes, it takes suggestions on what things might work for someone (everyone is different) and practice. Lots of it. One of our ringers who is making good progress sometimes cocks up because she's now able to get "ahead of the line" and loses focus on what's she needs to finish doing first.