The Lab Class

Early on in my collge days I realized that I liked playing piano for fun and not for a living so I changed schools and studied what in those days was called computer science. Eventually I ended up with a Therapuetic Recreation focus of study. As I was busy winding my way through various degree programs I avoided science lab classes at all costs. Maybe it is my bad vision, or my years of looking at black and white notes on paper, but microscopes have always gotten the best of me. I find it interesting but identifying things with one eye under pressure made me hallucinate - alas, what I saw under the microscope. was never on the test or the slide. There are many ways that people have blocks - I have microscope and lab blocking. The only reason I got through chemistry and biology classes in high school were my lab partners. I owe them still - LOL!

There was no way out of college without a lab class - I had to pick one - biology, chemistry or physics - ugh! I waited until my very very last quarter in college to take general education lab class. I finally settled on Physics and signed up for the class as pass fail and independent study. I had spent 4 years strategizing which lab class to take. This class called for three labs in order to get a pass. Even then I waited until the last possible week to take the lab test. I did fine with the self paced exams.

So just to make it clear how afraid of the labs I was - I waited until the last week of my entire college career to complete the general education requirements - in other words if I failed, I was not going to be done. I just had to add some pressure to myself.

As the final week came up and I had to find the lab room. I pathetically asked my good friend to go with me. I just knew I could screw this up - but I picked a time when there was a lab assistant so I could ask questions if I needed help. I ate a jar of peanut butter, met up with my friend and headed to the science building. We found the lab in the basement of the building. So there we were, in the lab room - and the labs had plastic cards with numbers to identify which exercise it was - I found all three stations I needed to complete to get a PASS and a diploma. I went to the first one - I had to measure a block of wood to tell the difference between centimeters and inches - to understand the metric system of measuring - WHAT? Didn't everyone do this in grade school?? Got that one done - but I had to measure it a few times just to make sure I was right....

The second and third labs were not that different - use a stop watch to measure the time lag in communications between the moon, Houston and the Kennedy Space Center - it was pre-recorded on tape. The third lab was a sound waves exercise using a pipe and water.
Frankly, I was a bit appalled at the cost of this class and that it was a higher education course. It worked for my pinch but I would not say it added any educational value to my life.

What was the real lesson? Procrastination really took a lot more energy than hitting this challenge head on would have required. I have found this true in training Gromit and Chewie for agility. Better to dig in and do the activities you are dreading - the longer I waited to train, the longer it took to train the behavior - I know - DUH!

I found Foundations to be fun for a bout 3 months. I could enjoy in that time all the skills required to solidify the foundations of agility. I learned how to use a clicker and trained Gromit to make toast - yep, he would press a little button on a toaster down - very fun trick! Then we had to start doing the contact game. The goal was to teach your dog to pay attention to their back feet and recognize when their back feet were on a board. They eventually would do it when moving forward and backward, but you start with backward. I started to get some performance anxiety early on whenever a lesson took more than a class for us to get. Here I was in a class with people that go to nationals and I have am trying to have a hobby I share with my dogs. How much time did they spend training? I had no idea, but I constantly felt like while I might have worked with Gromit on contacts and front and rear crosses - it never showed in class. It started to be kind of a joke with my good friend and I - I was kind of feeling like the remdial student. Eventually I realized most people/dogs teams had their challenges and most students I was in class with had mulitple dogs and more experience than I did with training for agility. We were not totally lame. Poor Gromit, I eased up on him and started to look at my own training faults. I wanted him to keep having fun. So I decided my new goal was to work his contacts first every time we worked and then I could do the more fun stuff. The trick was to make sure Gromit had as much fun playing contacts as he did with the jumps and front and rear crosses. Once we got contacts we could start doing all kinds of fun stuff - the dog walk, the a-frame and the teeter. Gromit did get it and today he proudly shows Chewie how to do contacts and barks little helpful hints when Chewie is missing the concept.

Another summer of Foundations just ended - Chewie and I are still working on Foundations - but instead of avoiding it I use if to solidify Gromit's skills at the same time as developing Chewie's. It makes for a lot of successful training and a lot of treats - and this means Gromit and Chewie are much more interested in playing games with me - sometimes they like to play games together without me - we are still working on a team name and logo...LOL!