Rethinking How We Teach Riding

Optimism, confidence and hopefulness are not the same things, though I have often lumped them together without giving it further thought. 

Our teaching model has always been driven by teaching skills and confidence. I am learning that confidence is a component of hopefulness but that the two are not synonymous.

This is not just some word play game. I am learning about the science of hope and how it can be effectively taught. So far it seems deceptively simple.

I am currently reading Hope Rising, by Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman. I learned of this field of study when, of all places, I was taking an intense study of the prosecution of strangulation cases. I am very hopeful that it will help us teach a more effective road to riding/living. 

 

The Sky Was Empty and The Land Was Dead

A warm spring day--not a cloud out, visibility for miles and miles. There were tractors breaking ground in field after field that we rode by. Perhaps the most tractors that I have seen in a day working at the same time in many years.

And there was not a single sea gull devouring the worms in the broken soil. Seagulls use to flock by the hundreds to eat the bugs and worms that the plows and cultivators would deliver to the surface. Not now. The feast is gone. 

Modern fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides have turned living soil into sterile death beds. With an altered and nearly non existent subsoil biome the only way that we can grow crops on such land is to force feed more poison into the soil. Farmland no longer consists of soil in much of our nation. Farmland is merely an enormous pot that holds the seed and poisons that must be replaced annually if the seed is to grow. 

And then on the way back from the ride an even more chilling sight struck me. First I noticed that the cotton stalks had not rotted although we had had one of the wettest and warmest winters of my life. As we went by a cornfield I saw that the lower ten inches of each dead cornstalk was still standing. 

Then I looked between the corn rows. Much of the remainder of the stalks were simply laying there. They had actually lay there, in contact with the soil, since last fall yet they had not decomposed and returned their nutrients to the soil.

The soil was so poisoned that decompositional microbes did not exist in sufficient numbers to rot the fibrous, pithy corn stalks. 

We use no poisons on our land. The picture above is of land that we slowly transformed into silvo pasture from mixed pine and hardwood growth. We did it by hand and much of the work was accomplished by using multispecies grazing to strengthen the soil. We practice and teach soil and water conservation, microbial pasture development, and wild life habitat production. I have been delighted (and surprised) at how much young children love to learn about the importance of a diverse and healthy biome beneath the soil if we are to produce healthy life above it. 

Our program is multifaceted from music, to horse training, to riding, to heritage breed  livestock preservation, to alleviating the effects of trauma--but teaching kids that poisoning the earth upon which they walk is a bad thing to do might be the most important aspect of what we do.

If you want your child to be a part of our program send me an email at msindianhorses@aol.com

Learned Optimism: A Chance To Succeed

Successes are the capitol used to buy actual happiness. If one wants a child to grow into a happy adult, it is vitally important for that child to be given repeated chances to succeed. 

Yes, each of those chances to succeed is also a chance to fail. That is what makes them so important.

 Success in the face of failure is an achievement. The alternative is to allow the child to forfeit, to loose the chance of achieving because there is a risk that the child might fail. Barring physical or sexual abuse, I do not know of anything that one could do to a child that will insure a life of unhappiness more than encouraging the child to go with the instinct to give up on the chance of achievement. If one wants to insure that an anxiety disorder sets in deeply in the mind of a young person, all one must do is to encourage fear and passivity in the face of a challenge.

Suppose you were only nine years old. Suppose that you had been riding for a very short time. Suppose that you had been learning fast and were invited to join in on a ride with more advanced riders. Suppose that you ride over fifteen miles on your first advanced ride. Suppose that you were joined on that ride by your Grandfather, who himself had limited time in the saddle. Suppose that you rode your mustang though deep mud, briers, standing water, and rugged terrain. Suppose that you were surrounded by people encouraging you to ride on.

There she is in the picture above . She earned the achievement of completing that ride. She was encouraged every step of the way by a supportive team of riders who understood the import of this ride. 

The teenagers who do not apply for a scholarship because they "probably would not get it anyway" become the adults  who do not seek a promotion at work because the "they probably have someone else in mind for the promotion anyway". And later in life, when the doctor tells them that the "test came back badly but that with surgery and treatment there is an 80% chance of full recovery" only hears that regardless of what is done there is a 2 in 10 chance of death. 

And it all goes back to never being encouraged to take on opportunities to achieve. Teach your child to learn what the child can do. Don't teach your child to believe that the child can do nothing. 

And She Rode Him Just Under Five Hundred Miles In 2020

She spent countless hours volunteering with everything else that needs doing a the horse lot, including training other horses, yet she still made time to ride her corolla, Little Hawk, far enough to win the Horse of The Americas "National Pleasure Trail Horse of The Year Award" for 2020.

There have been many pleasant surprises in the years spent developing our program. We can offer things that I never planned for. One of the most important things that we offer for young children is something that I did not anticipate. We give young kids a chance to be around first rate role models and mentors and Abigail is one of the best examples that any kid could find to look up to.

The Importance Of Social Media In Development Of Riding Programs

If in twenty years our program has grown by leaps and bounds, conserving more horses and other heritage livestock than we ever dreamed, reaching more people than we could have ever hoped for, bringing more light into dark worlds than anyone ever thought possible--to the degree that there would be no other program in the nation remotely achieving what our program does------then we will have totally failed.

If in twenty years there are hundreds of programs across the nation that do what we do, then, and only then, will we have built a successful program. This is not brain surgery. What we do can, and should, be duplicated in every corner of the country. We are always willing to work hard with fledgling programs and assist them at no charge. 

There is one simple catch to all of this--in order to build a program like ours one must first know what is possible.  That is where this blog and our group facebook page come into play. Following our program on either or both allows the reader to see what is possible. 

So use every tool that you have to get this blog and our social media before the eyes of the most people possible. When one considers how much work goes into what we do, solely by volunteers, with no paid staff at all--it is not much to ask that everyone do their part simply by pressing a share button.