One practice I visited were ringing plain hunt on 7 for their learners. I have no objection to ringing stuff to help learners, what I did object to was that there were four learners in it. So we had learners on the 2, 3, 4 and 5. There were some lumpy rounds and we went into the changes and it starts ok, and gets worse until the point where the 2 is somewhere up near 11ths place the 3rd never got higher than 5ths and there is a lot of shouting and it stands up. We tried again and again the slow decay set in until it stood. On the next attempt we actually got round, well that’s all was called at the end so I guess that that was progress. The next attempt was just the same as the first. I thought there has to be a better way than this.
And there is.
There is a concept called the prime ring, a term I first heard coined by Pip Penney, though I
have experienced this beforehand elsewhere. The idea is that for each learner
they have (at least) one piece of ringing where they are the only learner. This
has the huge advantage that, say in the plain hunt, the learner could rely on
the rest of the band to be right, and even give those tell-tale winks and
signals so that the learner knows who they should be following. The consequence
of this is then that the learner is able to learn things quicker because if
they are for instance following the third in fourths place they will always
know that that is in the right place instead of suddenly holding up because the
third is too high. They will be able to see the gaps, if they have rope sight and
certainly hear if they are wrong.
It is not always possible to give each learner a prime ring,
for instance, in the first example if there were only eight people in the practice
then to learn plain hunt on seven all learners would have to ring at once. If
it is not possible to have one learner per attempt then look at making sure
that they are not on bells that course each other, say the three and the four,
that way they head out in opposite directions.
Not every ring needs to be a prime ring, but I would suggest
that the learner should get at least one piece of prime each night if possible.
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