Teaching in the winter

I’m happy to report the class I’m currently teaching actually managed to meet last night. This is practically front page news. I was starting to get paranoid because I had to cancel two of the first three sessions due to horrible weather. Next year if I volunteer to teach in January, somebody please smack some sense into me. What was I thinking? When it started snowing yesterday, I was having visions of yet another cancellation, followed by visions of this class not wrapping up until July.

It’s an “Obedience For Agility” class, which follows neatly in the tracks of yesterday’s post. Thank you to everyone who responded and shared your thoughts. The dog training community in general is very supportive of each others’ interests and very little is served by perpetuating a negative stereotype about any particular discipline. Plus I had to laugh out loud last night when I collapsed, sweaty and out of breath, into my chair at the training building while working Phoenix, that anyone in their right mind could think obedience training is boring.

In a perfect world, we would all master obedience basics with our dogs before enrolling in agility classes, even if we had absolutely zero interest in ever showing in a formal obedience ring. It goes without saying you cannot teach a dog anything if you cannot control him and get him to interact with you in a reasonable fashion. In fact, some clubs require potential agility students and their dogs to take “Obedience 101” before they can participate in any kind of agility training. Kudos to them. But due to availability of time and classes - or more appropriately, lack thereof - many people end up taking obedience and agility classes at the same time or agility without the benefit of any obedience first.

No problem. It’s all dog training and you learn as you go. But frequently what happens, especially with beginning trainers, is they are drawn to teaching the more “glamorous” aspects of agility, like tunnels, weaves and those oh so impressive long and flowing jump sequences that simple skills like stays and recalls (did I actually call them "simple?" Smack me again.) are undervalued and neglected. Oh, the problems this can create in the long run.

Thus, “Obedience For Agility” was born. I’m sure it’s not an original concept. The idea for this class was spawned in my brain last fall, when my club stumbled into renting an absolutely beautiful training building for the winter. We don’t have a permanent training facility and honestly, we don’t need one for about six months of the year. Two club members have private buildings they let us use year around for teaching obedience classes and one has generously fenced a lovely flat field at her home for the club’s agility use.

But training outdoors in the Midwest from November through April is a total crap shoot, so we’ve bounced from one rental property to another every fall, always to pull out stakes and return to the great outdoors come spring. It’s going to be downright painful to leave our current home in the spring and who knows, maybe we won’t. But I digress.

The idea for this class popped into my head when a lot of my friends got puppies last year. How much fun would it be to teach a class for puppies that built skills they could use in two disciplines? So I volunteered, set a start date of Jan. 6, enrolled students and promptly forgot about it during the holidays. The first week of January rolled around, I made lesson plans, got psyched to start class and Mother Nature knocked us for a loop with a monster snow storm. We managed to meet the following week, only to cancel what should have been the third session due to a thick glaze of ice across the area.

So we’ve managed to meet twice. I’d hoped to be over half way done by now! The focus is on attention games, recalls and stays, plus a little walking with attention. Hopefully it will help these young guys and gal (seriously, the class is 7 boy puppies and 1 girl puppy) start to develop a good foundation for teamwork and make teaching the technical skills of agility a bit easier.

I’ll write more about some of the things we’re doing and why in a future post.

Today I am thankful for friends who let me play with their puppies, so I don’t have to get one.