Ringing Forums

It took me a few clicks to find it:

http://www.learningtheropes.org/scheme/learning-the-ropes

Then click on "Learn more" under each level.

There are certainly plenty of good ideas out there. The problem is getting people to adopt them. I prod and nudge a bit but to little effect. I worry about being too pushy as I don't want to cause trouble. Well not more than I normally do. i just keep on hoping that pennies will drop and ringers will will work out for themselves what needs to be done.

At the moment I am involved with five different groups of ringers. One is a monthly surprise practice that since the return has been firmly standard-8. Before The Great Lockdown we had been ringing a few PPE methods. Reversion now to how things used to be. Deciding what to do by referencing the past. At the other practices much (but not all) of the learning has been directed at middle-aged and elderly learners and with a view to getting them plain hunting and ringing Bob Doubles. Teaching as it always was. Again looking to the past. Where there is progress it is slow.

Why do we persist in this way? I think that for those who are doing the teaching it is the way they learnt and how, in decades past, they taught and it used to work in that enough ringers learnt this way, often quickly, and rapidly progressed onwards. But the learners were young and we probably had a high drop out rate but overall it worked. I think the penny that needs to drop is that, as a generality, a different approach is needed for older folk with much smaller steps and much more rope time. And an acceptance that some would best stick to call changes.

And teaching need to be organised outside of the traditional local tower set up to give viable support.

My current perpetual question is how to bring about change. I have more or less given up and just float along with whatever is happening and try to support it a bit. I can analyse suggest but I have no leadership skills.

I think that open practices are useful as social events and for consolidation but not for teaching/training. This needs to be organised and structured. Open practices are generally viewed as a success if lots of people turn up and everyone has a go at something. But does anyone ever really learn anything much? Is "Next monthly practice Saturday week. Special method Rutland. All welcome." ever really worked?

I think best start with your defined group (tower, branch, cluster, bunch of mates, whatever). Then get a grip of everyone's abilities, hopes and dreams. Establish what each individual could help with teaching and what each individual wants to learn and what help and support they need with that. Find out about peoples availability and so on. Then with this information create a development plan for each individual and a training structure to provide it. If any required T&D cannot be provided within you group look outside of it. Build a structure to suit people not have a structure and try to shove people into it. Polarised to make a point but, anyway, point made, I hope.

There are separate components here; what you can ring, how reliably you ring it and how well. They all matter.

... and so if 60% of ringers are now over 60 is the median age of ringers about 65?

ART used to talk about a pyramid. They probably still do. In my mind I imagine a graph, numbers of ringers on the y axis and level of attainment on the x axis. The graph rises steeply then continues to rise but more slowly at about ART level 3, flattens at about ART level 5 and then descends with a very long tail. But that is just my guess.
What matters of course is not so much the static graph but the dynamics. If that bulge at the bottom was full of people on the way up, as I believe it was in the first few decades after the second world war, then the future is bright. If it is not then it isn't. My worry is that while the numbers in the left hand side of the graph will probably reman high the numbers in the long tail to the right will diminish.
To know what is going on we need to collect and maintain data.

One thing that I am very confident about is that the average age of ringers will not keep on rising.

Did the post 2014 recruitment bring down the median age?

The trouble is that we have lost the middle, in both age and ability. Your local band might get you up to Bob Doubles if you are lucky. They you have to find a way of crossing the gap because the next step is Rigel in the Big City. Perhaps not quite that big a gap but finding decent eight and ten bell ringing is getting tricky from my limited view of the world.

Charging might not be a barrier to many but the way the economy is going charging will become a barrier to an increasing number of people, particularly our target demographic. It would have been a significant barrier to me in my youth. My guess is that charging would favour white middle-class middle- aged and elderly, and the children thereof, and disadvantage other groups. Might be wrong.

I agree about the funding. I think existing ringers should pay more. I would favour more realistic membership fees with money going to admin/BRF/Training.
I prefer to talk about a sense of reward rather than "fun" which sounds a bit light and fluffy but I agree, it has to be enjoyable. And there have to be opportunities to progress for those that can and wish to.

I thought that they are called Hasting's stays because replacing them is usually a bit of a battle.

I think it is probably worth starting a new thread on The Future of Ringing

Going back to the original post, I agree that the median point for all ringers is probably at about Bob Minor.

The more interesting question is what is the median point for those who lave learnt to ring in about, say, the last decade or two? I think that anyone who gets to ART level 5 is a bit of a star. How many new ringers get much beyond that?

As always we could do with a properly collected set of data but from observation and guessing: we don't teach enough younger people. We do keep teaching youngsters but most have them have stopped ringing by their early 20s, older folk tend to stick with it but don't (as a broad generality) progress very quickly or as far as younger people (some do get on well though, of course), those who might progress quickly and go a long way get stuck, perhaps very early on, because their local tower can offer little and there is no obvious route for them to take to progress, we recruit people on the basis of keeping their local bells ringing rather than people who are looking for a challenge of getting as far with method ringing as they can. Might have missed a few factors. The bulk of competent ringers are now rather elderly and learnt to ring decades ago when the world was a rather different place. Most of them learnt when they were young and stuck with it. For the last three decades the sticking with it after youth has gone. That is why we have ended up with two fairly distinct ability groups; both of them rather elderly and with a large ability gap in between. These days I seem to be spending most of my ringing time teaching middle-aged and elderly people plain hunting and Plain Bob. It is slow going and I will have stopped ringing due to my great age before they get very far. Of course that is not the whole picture, there are people of all ages ringing and there is not a total polarisation in the ability range.

The question is, what can we do about it? Are there just powerful trends in society that we cannot change or by significantly adapting the way we operate can we save method ringing? Have we left it too late whatever we try to do now?

Should we try to control the future anyway or do we just join in with what there is and go with the flow?

My guess is that it would be much the same. My guess would also be that most of the TB/Surprise ringers would be the same people but 2 decades older; the People in the PB group would be significantly different.

Only guessing mind.

Roger Booth can usually come up with a couple of buckets of stats on this sort of thing. Is he about?

One of my worries is succession in relation to steeple keeping and keepers. I think we are heading towards difficult times. I think that one factor that might be contributing to the problem is that Baby Boomers were born into a much more of an industrial age where practical hands-on mechanical knowledge was much more widespread than now. Do we go for a of more formal training of ringers in steeple keeping or push the bulk of tasks to professionals?

I think that the number of lapsed ringers is utterly huge. The vast majority of those that learn seem to give up eventually. Perhaps the more interesting question is why some of us carry on for so long. There are anecdotes of ringers returning now that we are up and running again. We could ask them why they stopped. The obvious first tack would be to ask people who have stopped (that we know of) why they did. And ask people who stop in future why. Given that open days often attract large numbers who come to look with only a very small percentage giving it a go we could perhaps routinely ask them if they do not fancy giving it a go why not?
My guess is that the root of the problem is our lack of flexibility. We are perhaps too rigid in times and locations for training, perhaps a lack of flexibility in providing for very different speeds of development and in trying for force everyone down the same developmental path. There are different levels of commitment and availability to provide for. Perhaps we ought to make better use of learner's different talents at an early stage in terms of perhaps administration, maintenance and so on.
My guess is that we need to seriously sort out a sensible T&D model whilst ensuring social cohesion. In my view the traditional tower-based model for T&D is way past bust. But that is just me guessing. We need to start asking.