Why I Decided to Try and Retrain My Grown Dogs From Scratch
I teach high school students how to read. If they can learn basic skills at an "old" age, I didn't see why my dogs couldn't do the same.
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Point of view: Your current dog is reactive and it sucks and it's not fun to take them out anywhere and it's exhausting-emotionally and physically.
I feel this way all the time. Whenever our first rescue, Porter, was an especially big turd, I would start scouring Petfinder and daydreaming about the very friendly and very social dog I would own Next Time and all of the training that I would do correctly-Next Time.
When COVID hit, we got another dog and then another dog and then another dog. AND GUESS WHAT? I now own FOUR reactive dogs and ZERO friendly, social dogs that are fun to take around town. I am in a way deeper hole than I was when I just had Porter, my Next Time planned failed miserably, and if I get another dog I'll be bankrupt. Oopsie Daisy.
When I realized I was at my dog limit and there would be more Next Time dogs on the horizon any time soon, I was bummmmmed out. How was I supposed to do Fun Outdoor Stuff with my current pack of furry psychos? How was I supposed to have hope if the chance to start over with a puppy was soooo far away?
And, most disappointingly, there seemed to be only one commonality between all of my dogs and all of their behaviors: me!
I seemed to be the problem.
Dammit.
When I had this thought, and before I started spiraling like flushed water in a toilet bowl, I stopped to re-evaluate this idea that I could only get things right in The Future and Next Time. Instead, I thought, if I wanted to get things right in The Future and Next Time, I should start by learning how to get things right--right now.
This was not an original thought that I've never had before, but I hadn't transferred the idea to my dog training; I had only used it in my "real" job as a high school reading teacher. As a teacher, almost daily, for 20 years straight-I've told myself to try again differently tomorrow.
I teach students who do not know the names of letters or that these letters have sounds. They do not know that these sounds create words. They cannot read, but, they are, for the most part, of average intelligence or even higher. They have had a tough time in life and somewhere along the road, this basic of most basic skills was overlooked.
Whenever I have a bad teaching day, I change things for the next; I don't just write the kids off because they are too old to learn to read. I try something different the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day (repeat for 1,000 days) until I find something that works. How this mindset stayed in my teaching silo and did not jump to my dog training silo until Dog 4 is beyond me. But it seemed like a logical thought that could be helpful for my current dog situation, especially compared to the alternative (giving up and running away forever and never showing my face ever again).
But where to start? How do I restart my grown dog's training now so that I can do better by my current dogs and learn more about what to do in the future?
This answer seemed to lie with my experience as a high school reading teacher-specifically reading. Although I teach all level of students from AP Lang & Comp to basic reading, my AP students follow a set trajectory: I teach them advanced skills--->I push them--->They work hard--->They make progress. My AP students are the Golden Retriever Guide Dog puppies I raised with my family when I was in high school: We attempted to train them-they learned despite our novice efforts. There was a wide margin for trainer error because Guide Dog puppies are bred well and basically train themselves. My AP students always learned even if I didn't get the lesson, mood, or vibe 100% correct. They learned even if I tried a new lesson that went poorly.
My reading students, on the other hand, are a house of cards: I need to layer each lesson PERFECTLY on top of the other with the exact right pressure. A HAIR too much and they explode or shut down or throw a desk and either way, class is over for everyone because now I have to deal with whichever little ticking time bomb I set off. Too little pressure and they are stuck forever learning the letter b, we make no progress, and my county graduates yet another illiterate student. Very few teachers want to be in these types of classrooms because learning this exact right balance of pressure is hard and getting it wrong sucks balls.
I felt my experience with my struggling readers might be relevant to my attempts to train my reactive dogs and I tried to retrace my steps as a reading teacher:
How do kids make it all the way to high school not being able to read? Can I use the answer to help me with me dogs?
Why there are kids in high school who can't read is simple and complex and simple all at the same time: they were never taught, or they were never taught in a way that made sense to them.
The why behind this is the complex part, as the teaching of reading, as with math, is fraught and everything seems to get in the way: the budget, the reading program, current reading trends, RIGOR!, teacher know-how, the county, the state, the federal government, the school schedule, parent desires, student desires....
The main roadblock at the high school level is the prevailing belief that high school students who can't read by that point are lost causes and we should give up trying to teach them. This was simply an unacceptable idea to me.
I had read somewhere that a lot of struggling readers were missing their foundational skills and could be remediated if we went back and filled in their phonics gaps. I wanted to test this at my school. I wanted to know if this was true in any way, shape, or form because if it was, why were we not trying to sort these kids out before they graduated? I ran straight into a lot of cement walls trying to find my answer.
I peddled the "fill in the gaps" idea all over my school and county until someone got tired of me and I finally gave me a chance to test this hypothesis I had read about. I was given two sections of Reading Strategies, a reading class for high school students who were reading well below grade level. My co-teachers and I got to work and quickly realized that the students needed phonics, so we used the only program I had been trained on in my graduate program and it didn't work. I later found out that the creators of this program were sued because had they covered up data that showed their program was not effective for struggling readers. I had failed my students and my first chance to prove that funding a class like this would be worth it.
The second year with my reading classes, there was new leadership in the county who were supportive of what I was trying to do. They bought me a new reading program that seemed more appropriate but required that students had a working knowledge of the difference between consonants and vowels.
"What's a vowel?" a student asked on the first day I tried to implement the program, representing the sentiments of his classmates after I had directed the class to point out the vowel in the word "bat." My brief answer, one that I thought would fix this problem right up and allow us to move on, was that "the vowels are the letters a,e,i, o,u." Boom! Problem solved. On to the rest of the lesson we go.
But no- NO. We were NOT moving on to the rest of the lesson because my students didn't have one fucking clue what I was talking about. Their faces said, "What the fuck are a, e, i, o, & U?!?!?!??!?!???!?!?"
And my facial expression said back "How the fuck do you not know what a, e, i, o, u are!?!??!"
And also: "How the fuck am I supposed to teach vowels?"
And then I thought, "What the fuck have I gotten myself into?
And lastly, "Who the fuck put me in charge of our youth?" I had no idea what to do next. In that moment, I knew we were potentially screwed.
If I was an elementary teacher, I would have known what to do next. They know foundational reading skills backwards and forwards and can teach it in their sleep while also doing laundry and cartwheels. But I wasn't an elementary school teacher. My reading education was focused on scaffolding higher level texts and building higher level thinking skills. I did now know how to teach vowels so that they would stick in my students' brains.
But I did want to know. And I was curious: How far back in their reading education did I need to go? If they couldn't grasp vowels, what else didn't they know? Where did I need to start?
I got my answer the third year I was assigned to teach reading. One of my former students had gone off to college and came back to work with me as a reading teacher. She had been tutoring on the side and making progress with her older students using a program that I was not trained in (yet). She knew the answer to my question: We had to go back, way back, aaaaaalllllll the way to "These are letters. They have names and sounds."
Godddammmit.
We had to start at the beginning.
Maybe not the beginning, beginning, because there's still a LOT that happens to create good readers before they get to print, but...we were back there. Way back there in the land of basic phonics. And I'll tell you: That shit was (and is) sooooooo sooooo boring. Boring. Boring. Boring...like 8 hours of HR-created health and safety training videos boring. No wonder why every teacher grades infancy-30 wants to skip phonics instruction.
But, there was no way around it. If we wanted them to eventually be able to read complex texts, they needed the basic tools to do it. They needed the boring, repetitive practice of connecting letters to sound...and they needed way more than the average kid. I started the program.
Even though I was untrained in this particular program and my efforts were haphazard, and even though the kids were fighting me about "having to do baby stuff," and asking "why were they still in this class?" (answer: your teacher (me) was previously incompetent), I was finally making progress The kids that had not made any gains in the last two years were finally clawing their way out of their rut. Their scores, slowly, slowly, slowly creeped up, with some even reaching the cut off to get out of the class.
The secret was this: I had to meet the kids where they actually were and not where everyone wished them to be.
Once I swallowed this pill and blocked out all of the pressure from the school, the county, and the state to HURRY UP and make miracles happen, it was just a matter of patience and reps...more patience...more reps...more patience...more letters...more reps... more refining my teaching...more reps...more patience...until we got the kids where they needed to go.
Finally making progress with my reading students was a full circle moment for me: A student I had taught in the past came back and taught me. My student had become my teacher and because of it, we knew first hand that an older high school student who has had a tough time could, with the right amount of reps and structure, still be taught to read.
...which brings me to my dog pack...
It was starting to dawn on me, as it had when I started teaching reading, that I may have missed some all of the dog-training basics in my rush to do Exciting & Cool Things With My Dogs. Every time I hired a trainer to help me with something scary like dog-reactivity, they would inevitably say something like "Okay, let's get started... with the basics."
To which I would counter:"No goddammit-I need my dogs to get used to other dogs and I need you to pull 600 Golden Retrievers out of that car right now so we can work on it!"
I realize now that this situation with my dogs and their trainers was basically the equivalent of me running around my school district being like "We need to teach the kids their basic letter sounds!!!!!" And, in response, the district officials being like "LETTER SOUNDS?!?!?!?! WE NEED YOU TO JUMP TO SHAKESPEARE, NUMB NUTS." Same situation. Same argument between parties. Different type of student. I apologize to all the trainers who tried to help me. Only now, after my experience with my reading class, was I starting to put two and two together.
I had made a classic teaching mistake with my dogs: I had not properly built up my dogs' foundations. Their foundation, as a collective pack, was looking like a gap-riddled, late-game Jenga tower. This was not going to work. My dogs' baseline reactive behaviors would never improve if I could not figure out how to properly rebuild their training base.
I could see this issue clearly with my human students but I had missed it with my dogs... or maybe assumed it didn't apply to them. More likely, though, I thought I had covered the basics, only to be reminded my dogs' daily psycho-ness that I most certainly had not.
But, I really wanted to learn. How far back in their training did I need to go? My dogs were grown, after all. And then it hit me- I already knew this answer. I had already been down this road before with my reading students: There was only one way forward to our more advanced goals, and it was backwards.
I needed to start all over.
From the beginning.
And get it right this time. Not Next Time with my Next Dog---right now with my Right Now Dogs.
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