Good News

The thing about practice is you should do it every day. The good news is you don’t have to spend hours and hours. You’ve got lots of essential things to do, right?

Twenty minutes a day will make a difference. When I was teaching, I asked my students to read for 20 minutes every night. 

Kids who enjoyed reading said, ‘Okay, we can do that.’

Kids who found reading dull said, ‘Okay, we can do that.’ 

 Twenty minutes isn’t a lot of time out of your day. Try this: you’ll need a ruler and two coloured pencils.

 Draw a line 100mm (millimetres) long using one colour. Next, use the second colour to put a dot at the two-millimetre mark on the 100mm line.

The 100mm line is the number of minutes in one day. (There are 1440–thanks for asking.) The dot is the 20 minutes you’ll spend practising something, like reading, kicking a footy, playing a musical instrument, writing, shooting baskets. The list is endless.

Twenty minutes of practising leaves 1420 minutes to do other stuff. You’ll have to think about time for sleeping, going to school, eating, watching TV, going shopping, or arguing with your brother. (Or sister, if you don’t have a brother. Or yourself, if you don’t have either one.)

You’ve got the rest of the 100mm line to do that. Is that Good News, or what?