To Teach is To Learn

 

I wince at the term "riding instructor." The world is filled with people better suited than am I to teach riding. Instead I work very hard to teach kids to want to ride. Kids that really want to ride become dedicated riders. I strongly suspect that you are looking at a picture of a boy that will be a first rate mandolin player. Monday night I was impressed with what he has been taught to do on a guitar and I told him that at the appropriate time he could borrow my mandolin and figure it out. At the end of our session Monday we decided that we had reached the appropriate time. His mother sent me this picture with a note that he has been playing nonstop since then. This all brings us back to one of the central purposes of this blog. The established horse world has created a system of horse care that is detrimental to the health of horses, destructive to efforts to build solid relationships with horses and all at a cost that is beyond the means of working families. That system must be replaced one step at a time and one of the first steps is to get more people teaching kids to ride at affordable rates. Teaching kids to ride amounts to teaching kids to not be afraid to ride. After that everything else falls into place. When it comes to teaching kids to ride inspiration is the most important part of instruction.