(no subject)

Thyme did fine today, as expected. I read some of Dorrance's True Horsemanship Through Feel last night over dinner (curried cauliflower and rice, mmm-mmm good!) and so worked on some of that stuff today along with the planned walk-under-saddle. Absolutely nothing exciting happened there but she's progressing well with the picking up of feet. Tomorrow we are trying on bridles to see how all of that goes. I need to do some lateral under-saddle work with Nick. I also need to order a neoprene girth in "pony" size.

I read the "All education is despotism" thing over at Critical Mass and I got to thinking about education. Mostly I hated being educated, but it took me years to figure out that the way *education* felt about me was mostly institutional and not personal. In the process of me thinking about education, I ran across my first grade teacher's email address. She's still teaching, which you wouldn't think was possible because she'd have to be getting a bit long in the tooth -- but Miss Boyd (still Miss Boyd, btw.) was a first year teacher when I showed up in her first grade class. I'm contemplating whether or not I should email her and apologize for my first-grade self.

(no subject)

Brother Roy mentioned that, while he found the equine corrugated roofing tin challenge interesting, he couldn't really see what the hell that had to do with making a good riding horse. I'm sure that everyone else (crickets chirping) is similarly interested.

Corrugated roofing tin, so that we're all on the same page, is that stuff used to roof barns and sheds in rural Pennsylvania. A sheet of corrugated roofing tin in my world is a wavy sheet of metal, about 2.5' by about 8'. To construct the challenge, I put two sheets on the ground, side by side, to make a 5'x 8' patch, too big for the horse to jump over easily. (If you are getting the horse stressed enough to leap over the corrugate, you are not doing the exercise properly.) The proximal goal of the exercise is to convince the horse to walk (quietly and easily) over the corrugated metal. The distal goal is to shed light on some important points about the human-horse relationship.

Three things I want my horse to know:

1. Nothing I ask is impossible, painful, or as difficult as it appears
   
2. I will allow time for you to work on solving a given problem
   
3. I will reward your partial steps in the correct direction
   

If the horse is confident of these three things, she becomes a better, more relaxed problem-solver. She tries harder to find the *right* answer. This is a good thing. Also, horses, even jumpy, skittish, nervous horses, get better at handling new situations with practice. Put them in (safe, carefully-constructed) "new" situations over and over and they will improve at handling them using the thinking part of their brains instead of the OHMYGOD IT'S GONNA EAT ME!!! part of their brains.

Way I see it, there's no chance I can teach Thyme about everything she'll ever see in her life as a riding horse. Besides that, many of the challenges she'll have to face are impossible for me to simulate in the wide spot of the driveway at Liss's house. What I can teach her is *how* to face new situations, using the materials at my disposal... and one of the materials at my disposal is sheets of corrugated roofing tin.