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Post by rideanotherday on Jun 20, 2016 20:26:43 GMT
My background with training people is for safety, in specific food safety. You have much more leeway and choice in who you teach, and if you don't want to teach them or feel that they won't fit in your program, you get to send them on their merry way.
In my world, if I can't teach food safety and engage compliance, other people could become quite sick or die. I don't get to pick who is hired to work minimum wage production positions. Whatever and whoever is hired or has been hired, that's who I have to engage and teach. There is no such thing as an easy student.
I have tools to engage people and do the best I can. Trying to convince people who "have always done it this way" is as hard in its own wau as the younger set. Fortunately, I still find enjoyment in accomplishing engagement.
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Post by horseguy on Jun 20, 2016 20:46:06 GMT
That's interesting in that the students you get have a different motivation. I am familiar with ServSafe. Karen has a bakery, help, and we must follow those rules. Our income and the wages of employees require it. Riding students come for lessons usually for their own enjoyment. So man arrive at the barn saying something like, "Finally I can enjoy myself". I sincerely try to help them with that goal, and I believe it includes keeping them out of an ambulance. But they are not going to get paid if they do it right and they won't lose their income if they do it wrong.
Except one funny story. Many years ago a middle-aged woman came to the barn very stressed, inquiring about lessons. I eventually asked why she was so tense and worried. She told me that many months before she was in a bar with friends and they concocted a plan to go horseback riding in Ireland. She put up something like $2,000, even though she had never ridden a horse, and then pretty much forgot about it. Her flight left in 2 weeks. She had to learn to ride. She was a highly motivated student.
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Post by rideanotherday on Jun 21, 2016 10:03:17 GMT
That's interesting in that the students you get have a different motivation. I am familiar with ServSafe. Karen has a bakery, help, and we must follow those rules. Our income and the wages of employees require it. Riding students come for lessons usually for their own enjoyment. So man arrive at the barn saying something like, "Finally I can enjoy myself". I sincerely try to help them with that goal, and I believe it includes keeping them out of an ambulance. But they are not going to get paid if they do it right and they won't lose their income if they do it wrong. Except one funny story. Many years ago a middle-aged woman came to the barn very stressed, inquiring about lessons. I eventually asked why she was so tense and worried. She told me that many months before she was in a bar with friends and they concocted a plan to go horseback riding in Ireland. She put up something like $2,000, even though she had never ridden a horse, and then pretty much forgot about it. Her flight left in 2 weeks. She had to learn to ride. She was a highly motivated student. Back when I was a trail guide, we would get the occasional hunter who had decided to go on an elk hunt and they had to ride in to camp etc. They sincerely thought that an hour's ride would teach them everything they needed to know and make them into a "cowboy" so they wouldn't look like a total greenhorn. If they told me that's what they were there for, I told them straight up the only way they weren't going to be saddle sore and show off how much they didn't know was to show up every day and ride a few times per day until the day they left. I only had one guy take me up on that. He came back after his trip and tipped me $200 for what he learned. Apparently, he found out how right I was. My favorite bit of advice for him to make sure he didn't look like a total greenie around horses was to keep his hands down. Once there, he found out how right I was. The hunt guides mentioned how much more experienced he seemed. Kinda nice that he listened and then came back to let me know how it went.
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Post by grayhorse on Jun 22, 2016 2:26:46 GMT
It's interesting to hear the trainer's perspective. Even when I was new to horses I could tell almost right away that my best riding was done while in a clinic or lesson, basically anytime a professional (a REAL one not a stick a feather in your hat type) was helping me and guiding me from the ground. Why? Because I could feel and see the difference in my horse and myself. This was always so obvious to me and still is. Now that I'm past the basic stuff, the difference that lessons have on my riding is pretty darn profound. I wonder sometimes how it is that other people do not see this within themselves and in their own horses.
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Post by horseguy on Jun 22, 2016 11:16:46 GMT
The answer may be as simple as the general level of riding instruction has declined. Most of the benefit that an instructor can provide to a student is their "eye" and their ability to prioritize for the rider what their eye sees. At any given moment a competent instructor sees a half dozen or so things in a rider that could improve. There is always a list. The skill is to identify which item on the list, if addressed in that moment, will create an immediate improvement in the rider that the rider can experience.
With beginner riders, the first priority is typically to get the rider to release tension in a specific part of their body. That would be like, "Relax your elbows and let your hands fall". Or relax your knees, etc. As an instructor develops their eye and sees more subtle specific potential improvements, it becomes more about guiding the rider to deeper levels of unity. For example, a more capable instructor sees every disruption of balance and communication between horse and rider, however brief. These are the rider errors most trained horses sort out as noise. But for the more advanced rider, decreasing the level of noise they make that distracts their horse is how they can improve. My observation is that few contemporary instructors can see these small annoyances that briefly break unity by distracting their horse from their work. These are typically inconsequential issues, so there is no great loss in not addressing them, except when a student really wants to move forward and become a better rider, or if they want to move up to the next level of competition.
The last level of quality instruction is to help advanced riders do more with less. There are ways we do things with defined combinations of cues. Seat and leg, or inside rein/ outside leg are examples. A very good instructor can see how a particular horse and rider can accomplish the communication of these combinations of cues with a single cue. This is the level of mastery in riding. It is learning to do more with less. Dedicated riders spend years learning all the detailed means of connection and communication with their horse. They fill their tool box with very effective specialized tools. In the last stages of instruction, the teacher has to convince them to put down some of their hard earned tools. It reminds me of the Clint Eastwood line if Grand Torino. He gives the kid a pair of Vice Grips, a can of WD40 and a roll of duct tape and says, "Kid, you will find that you can solve 90% of the problems in life you will encounter with these three things". Mastery is when a rider does more with less and only a master rider can tell them how to do that.
It's becoming more and more difficult to find instructors who are effective at all the levels of teaching today. I think a lot of it has to do with the instructors don't ride that much anymore. In the 50s and 60s instructors were always mounted when they taught. They would demonstrate, or they would be training a horse during the lesson. That standard is pretty much gone. I think the other element is that today there is more of a focus on psychology over imparting skills in riding instruction. Students prefer validation over how to do "x". It used to be that getting plateaued out in your riding progress was a problem. Not so much these days. Now people write off their lack of progress with, "I'm having a good time". And the competitions are accommodating this sluggish kind of teaching/riding improvement by dumbing down the levels of the equestrian sports.
I think riders and parents of riders have to demand more of instructors. I have had parents ask for the list of things their daughter could improve upon. I love that. Most parents would perhaps feel that their daughter is failing if after a couple years of instruction the kid still has a dozen areas to work on. But some want to know. A really good instructor can give you the whole context of the riding skills you have, the degree of proficiency you have with each skill, as well as a map to a specific goal or goals in your riding. It's called curriculum, but few instructors have a very deep curriculum today because they never learned one. This is where the Federation could be of great help.
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