I passed my driving test in the summer of 1989. At the second attempt. It was a great day. Banishing memories of the first time round – the crushing disappointment of first-time failure at this liberating rite of passage.
My first attempt at the driving test met with unqualified failure (in every sense). It came at the end of a five day residential ‘crash’ course (unfortunate term) in North Wales. This entailed five days of intensive driving practice with a fellow learner and a world weary driving instructor called Dave. We pootled along the sea-front and down the quiet roads of Llandudno and Rhyll , negotiating the gentle traffic and sedate one-way system with fellow drivers whose average age was closer to 100 than 17. The week ended with a driving test on the Friday afternoon. My mother had found the driving school, whose advertising literature promised a 100% pass rate for 17 year old drivers. I was 17: and I was about to ruin their stats.
After five days of driving experience and four nights of driving talk, I failed the test on several key faults. Undue hesitation. Speeding in a 30 mile an hour limit (I was going 34 miles an hour). Failing to check my mirror before performing a manoeuvre. Stalling at a junction. It was a tragedy of motoring errors. I was a 17 year old menace on the roads, most of all because the course had given me a false sense of confidence. Luckily – for other road users – I fell apart under test conditions and failed. And with this failure, I reluctantly entered the Hall of Fame of the Llandudno School of Motoring. I was the first 17 year old to fail.
Ten months later, I took my test again in Winchester. And passed. This time round I was successful – and my efforts met with success because of three important reasons.
- One – I had practised over a longer period with a focus on becoming a decent driver, rather than getting through the test.
- Secondly, I had more varied, and more genuine road experience.
- Thirdly, I was wearing my lucky trainers. And my lucky pants.
It also happened that the driving test examiner was studying an Open University degree in Theology – the same subject that I was about to study at University – and he had a cat called Leo. There was a sense of alignment. This is often the case with our successes. Things click into place: if you’ve put in the hours.
I’m lucky that I have a very short commute to work. On foot. This means that I don’t drive as much as some people do. But, I now have miles of driving experience. Indeed, I calculate that I must have racked up 200,000 miles of driving since 1989. I’ve put in lots of practice. And yet, strangely, I am certainly not a world-class driver. In fact, I’m probably a worse driver than I was about 12 months after passing my test. Why?
The reason is this. I have developed bad habits; I’m crossing my hands when steering; driving with one hand; checking my mirror insufficiently often. I’ve gently forgotten aspects of the highway code. And, crucially, I am not striving to improve. I am simply carrying out a series of automatic actions, performed from muscle memory. My mind is not as sharply focused on the multiple tasks of driving well. It slips onto other things: I’m thinking about work, day-dreaming or talking. When my children were younger, I would be swivelling my head around to issue reprimands and unenforceable threats. In terms of driving, I worry that I am too often on autopilot. This is particularly the case when on a familiar route. Miles can drift by and suddenly I think – ‘I can’t remember anything from the last 10 minutes of driving’. I don’t think I’m dangerous! But, my mastery of driving has stopped growing. Habit has deadened the alertness I had when I was a newly qualified driver.
I collect quotations. In my little book, I have two favourite ones on the subject of habit. They totally disagree with each other. Pupils and staff at Shrewsbury will know well my regular quoting of Aristotle on this subject:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
I use this to promote the idea of practice and routines – towards success and becoming fully human, virtuous, good.
On the other hand, Marcel Proust once remarked pithily:
“Habit weakens everything”.
Both are correct. If our practice, our habits, lose mindful attention, they may weaken in the performance. However, if we apply full attention, our habits of excellence become – more excellent.
In his book, ‘Bounce’, Matthew Syed explored the difference between practice that demands deep concentration and application. The activities and occupations in which we truly grow are those which stretch us, demand more each time. The path to mastery is one with no clear end – there is no such thing as the perfect round of golf, piece of art, musical performance. Even finite tasks with finite answers can be performed more elegantly or more quickly: if we’re motivated by challenge and view practice as an infinite game.
Research across many domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become. What this implies is that it is not just the quantity of the practice, but also the quality of the practice and the challenge it exposes us to.
This applies to our academic work as much as it does any other activity in life. Working hard is not the same as working smart. This crucial difference is one that we, as teachers and educators, need to help learners fully to understand. ‘Practice makes perfect’, the saying goes. Or rather, practice inches us closer to the unachievable goal, the Zeno’s paradox, of perfection. And in this pursuit – whether academic, artistic, moral or any other type of growth – we become more fully human.
In this sense, we are all still learning to drive.
Leo Winkley: Letters From Shrewsbury 