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Oct. 6th, 2012 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickAttending the Brannaman clinic in West Virgina. Very educational, indeed.
The clinic is a four-day affair. Each day has two sessions, morning and afternoon. Morning session is "foundation horsemanship" and afternoon is "horsemanship 1". The morning session is focused more on ground work and getting solid with working with the horse, the afternoon session is for more-confident/capable riders who do most of their work from the saddle.
I enjoy seeing other people work with their horses, but clinics have a certain amount of issue built into their structure. The groups (morning and afternoon) are about 25 horse-human pairs per session. It's group instruction, which means there is not a lot of individual attention. People who get the most out of this are people who can watch/listen with a demo and then follow-the-model (correcting errors in their own technique) to duplicate results on their own critters. This is not an ideal learning situation for some people. It is also a learning situation where the class is going to move too fast or too slow for most learners. Finally, in group instruction, there are subtleties and nuances (even in moving something as large and visible as a horse) in technique that may well be lost on the student.
Another thing that somewhat worries me about clinicians is the Cult of Personality that forms around them. I do not think that clinicians try to do this on purpose but it does seem to happen to them. They have... groupies. Part of how clinicians (with horses) make money is that they sell videos, dvds, and assorted horse accessories to support people working with their horses. And that's OK, but sometimes leads to problems. You see, frequently, there exist people who buy every dvd and scrap of material associated with the clinician. And it's kind of creepy. (Maybe the creepy is just creepy for me.) I get the feeling (from the groupies) that if they get all the gear and all the dvds, that somehow the dude's horse-fu will also rub off on them. It doesn't work like that and it just makes them look sad, like Socially Awkward Penguin.
Horsemanship is not produced by playing dress-up. It isn't the gear people buy (and some of these people have absolutely stunning rigs) or how many times they've watched the videos. It's a measure of how well a person interacts with his horse, a skillset that is (largely) a function of how much work he puts into interacting well with his horse, to improving his feel, his timing, his releases, etc.
There exist people who attend clinics with their horses who do not follow the clinician's directions and do not make a reasonable effort to practice the exercises. And I'm sitting there in the bleachers, going all WTF? Why waste your money that way? What is the point of going to the clinic and spending four days not-doing-the-exercises? So that you can say "I went to XYZ's clinic and rode with XYZ but it didn't do shit for my horse?" Hell. The point of going to clinics is to try to improve your horsemanship. If you're not going to try to improve, save your money and let the clinic spot go to someone else who might actually use it.
The clinic is a four-day affair. Each day has two sessions, morning and afternoon. Morning session is "foundation horsemanship" and afternoon is "horsemanship 1". The morning session is focused more on ground work and getting solid with working with the horse, the afternoon session is for more-confident/capable riders who do most of their work from the saddle.
I enjoy seeing other people work with their horses, but clinics have a certain amount of issue built into their structure. The groups (morning and afternoon) are about 25 horse-human pairs per session. It's group instruction, which means there is not a lot of individual attention. People who get the most out of this are people who can watch/listen with a demo and then follow-the-model (correcting errors in their own technique) to duplicate results on their own critters. This is not an ideal learning situation for some people. It is also a learning situation where the class is going to move too fast or too slow for most learners. Finally, in group instruction, there are subtleties and nuances (even in moving something as large and visible as a horse) in technique that may well be lost on the student.
Another thing that somewhat worries me about clinicians is the Cult of Personality that forms around them. I do not think that clinicians try to do this on purpose but it does seem to happen to them. They have... groupies. Part of how clinicians (with horses) make money is that they sell videos, dvds, and assorted horse accessories to support people working with their horses. And that's OK, but sometimes leads to problems. You see, frequently, there exist people who buy every dvd and scrap of material associated with the clinician. And it's kind of creepy. (Maybe the creepy is just creepy for me.) I get the feeling (from the groupies) that if they get all the gear and all the dvds, that somehow the dude's horse-fu will also rub off on them. It doesn't work like that and it just makes them look sad, like Socially Awkward Penguin.
Horsemanship is not produced by playing dress-up. It isn't the gear people buy (and some of these people have absolutely stunning rigs) or how many times they've watched the videos. It's a measure of how well a person interacts with his horse, a skillset that is (largely) a function of how much work he puts into interacting well with his horse, to improving his feel, his timing, his releases, etc.
There exist people who attend clinics with their horses who do not follow the clinician's directions and do not make a reasonable effort to practice the exercises. And I'm sitting there in the bleachers, going all WTF? Why waste your money that way? What is the point of going to the clinic and spending four days not-doing-the-exercises? So that you can say "I went to XYZ's clinic and rode with XYZ but it didn't do shit for my horse?" Hell. The point of going to clinics is to try to improve your horsemanship. If you're not going to try to improve, save your money and let the clinic spot go to someone else who might actually use it.
