(“Totally nutty if you ask me.”)

It’s unfair to criticize a teaching method if it works. Different instructors teach in their own ways. Many times the approach they adopt is the one they themselves learned by. In any case instructors must be comfortable with the mien and method they select.

Students’ personalities, their needs, and the techniques they best respond to vary greatly as well. Each instructor must decide how much he wants to bend his methods (while not compromising his principles) to please an individual student. Speaking for myself for instance, there’s just a limit to how treacly-sweet I can make myself be and still look in the mirror the next day.

Some students crave praise and dissolve into a puddle without it. Other riders have told me, “I need to be yelled that. You can be tough!” Totally nutty if you ask me.

Some students want to talk the whole time (possibly because then they don’t have to ride as much). Pair them up with an instructor inclined to pontificate and admire his own voice, and you have a match made in heaven. Learning may not be taking place, but at least everybody’s happy.

I have encountered instructors (and riders) who feel they’re only getting their money’s worth if every move the horse makes is described in excruciatingly detailed bio-mechanical terms (preferably using every muscle’s Latin name). More power to them!
And I have run into instructors who, like a puppeteer, micromanage every breath their rider takes. Maj. Lindgren always referred to these as “air controller lessons.” Some riders like these, but he felt they indicated either an instructor’s insecurity or a student’s laziness.

“Riders need time to think,” he always said. “If you fill the air with directions and advice every second, they don’t have a chance to do that.” To encourage creative, thoughtful riding, his approach was to choose an appropriate exercise designed to reveal a principle or a feeling, and have the rider repeat that pattern while he gave periodic feedback to correct an aid, the rider’s position, or the horse’s actions. That way, he felt, the rider had time to process both what she was being told and what the results felt like–results that she’d be more likely to re-create on her own than if she only rode like an obedient robot.

It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but over the years it worked for him, and it has always worked for me. It does place more responsibility on the rider, and the teacher does have to be open enough to explain to his student why he has chosen a particular reprise and what should be learned from it.

Learning happens at a rate not always controllable by either party. Like sometimes when it’s “just good and darn ready.” To stop and explain is helpful at times. Other times it’s much more fruitful to respond to a rider’s query with, “Not now. Just try it again!”