Why I Decided to Start my Grown Dogs' Training All Over Again

In my real life, I am a high school reading teacher. 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 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.

"How," you may ask. How do kids make it all the way to high school not being able to read?

The answer 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....At the high school, a huge roadblock is the prevailing belief that students of that age who can't read are lost causes and we should give up trying to teach them.

But, because I read too much, 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... and I wanted to try. 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 got out into the world?

I peddled this idea all over my school and county and until someone got tired of me and I finally gave me a chance to test the "fill in the gaps" 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 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. Crown me reading teacher of the year right. now. 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 the first fucking clue what I was talking about. Their faces said, "What the fuck are a, e, i, o, & U?!?!?!??!?!???!?!?" And in that moment, I knew I was fucked. First I thought, "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.

If I was an elementary teacher, I would have known what to do next. They know this stuff backwards and forwards and could teach it in their sleep. 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 this class. One of my former students had gone off to college to became a reading teacher and came back to work with me. 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, all 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 read 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, 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" (re: your teacher was 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 (including me) wanted them to be.

Once I swallowed this pill and blocked out all of the pressure from the school, county, and 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 wanted 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.

The very boring, unsexy, and effective letter tiles in my classroom.

...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 inevitably say something like "Okay, let's get started... with the basics." To which I would counter with"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!" This 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. What did I need to know? How far back in their training did I need to go? And then it hit me- I already knew this answer. I had already been down this road before with my reading students: The 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.

The training board is revived.

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