WHAT DOG TRAINING HAS TAUGHT ME ABOUT EDUCATION; OR, WHY MY DOG MAKES ME THINK OF CHARLOTTE MASON, PART THE FIFTH

 

Today I'm thinking about needs and schedules, and how the one might be the key to the other. In other words, while I've talked before on this blog about what's been a fairly effective approach to scheduling for my family, working with a new dog has sparked a fresh set of epiphanies that I can only wish I'd had while my children were still at home. 

Mind you, everyone seems to have survived my not having had these epiphanies earlier. I am not the perfect mother; I was not the perfect mother-educator. I made plenty of mistakes that I can identify in hindsight, and I'm sure I made a lot more than that. It's probably good that I remain unaware of many of my own failings, because it would be easy to obsess about them, especially now when it's too late, and in any event, God's grace truly is sufficient where we ourselves are insufficient. If that grace kicked in for me, it will for you, too. One day you too will undoubtedly have thoughts about what you might have done differently and better, but rest assured: it will all be okay.

Also, I should qualify anything I say in this series with the caveats that 

*dogs aren't people, and in many ways are far EASIER than people.

*I have one dog, which is easier than any number of children, especially when the number of children is more than one.

Still, this situation means that I can see a lot of things clearly, for the simple reason that I am not overwhelmed. There's a lot I probably didn't see earlier because I was often overwhelmed. The good news now is that being not overwhelmed, I can see a few things more clearly than I once could. If you are overwhelmed, maybe I can see some things clearly for you in a way that's helpful. I hope so, at any rate. 

Today, again, what I'm chewing on is the idea of scheduling. By this I don't really mean the order of subjects in your school day, though that's obviously a not-unimportant level of scheduling. Here I'm thinking more about the large structure of your day, and how the way you spend chunks of time during the day is ordered by needs, both your needs and those of the people for whom you are responsible. Or, in my case, my needs and my dog's, which on the whole makes things a lot simpler. 

Now, one of the reasons I got a dog, aside from the fact that I really missed and mourned my old dog, who had died in August, was that once I was left to myself in my house, my days had begun to go pear-shaped. Especially once I'd finished organizing the chaotic upstairs which the children had vacated, I found myself not sitting down to write a new novel or  lots of poems, not going for long productive walks, not really doing anything but rattling around. I had time, which I had wanted and waited for –- but when that time was completely unstructured, with nobody's needs pressing on it, I found myself not doing nearly as much with it as I had hoped. As the fall progressed, I began to feel I was dying on the vine. 

Enter Dora, pictured above in mid-air, which is where she likes to spend a good bit of her own time. 

With Dora, enter certain needs. Like people, though naturally on a rather more basic plane, dogs have an array of different needs, which each day beg to be met. They need: 

*nourishment: good food and water 

*safety/a consciousness of safety

*activity, both physical and mental, including both play and work

*society and affection 

*rest and refreshment (including but not limited to sleep)

While, again, dogs' needs are reasonably basic, they are also not substantially different from children's elemental needs. Children, too –– in fact, all human beings at any age –– need everything on this list, every day, to be healthy in body and mind. For human beings, of course, there's also the level of the soul, though as Catholics we might acknowledge that everything on this list should be oriented toward nurturing the soul as well as the material being. For us, it's not as though we do all the body/mind stuff, and then we have some catechism or pray the rosary. We do do those latter things, but our care of the soul doesn't end with them. We understand the whole human person to be an integrated complex of body, mind, and spirit, not a set of compartments like a bento box. 

This recognition is important for potentially infinite reasons, but here I raise it as a qualification for the idea that you structure your day around needs. In focusing on physical and mental needs, and using my dog as a paradigmatic analogy, be assured that I'm not downplaying the needs of the soul. But you have to start somewhere with a vision for the structure you want to create, and it makes sense to begin with the most fundamental, elemental, basic level of need, granting yourself room to work upward from there. 

It's also most helpful, I think, to begin with the most universal sense of need. There's a reason why Charlotte Mason talks broadly about children as a class of people, and it's not that she didn't realize that children are individuals with their own personal and particular sets of needs. It's simply that in thinking about what all children need, you set up broad frameworks that generate a shape for things. Within those frameworks, you can then move around to meet individual needs. 

Here's an example from my current and ongoing dog-training adventure: 

My trainer says that as a general rule, dogs need two hours of activity a day. 

This is an online trainer, who does not know my dog personally. She will probably never meet my dog in person. Still, the fact remains that she knows dogs. What she offers as a universal paradigm, I feel comfortable accepting as a given, because her experience with dogs is far wider than mine. Whether my dog is high- or low-energy, large or small –– whatever my particular dog is like –– I can still accept the large rule as one key to the structuring of my day. However I'm going to order the day, one factor that's going to affect that order is the knowledge that the periods of activity I schedule in need to add up to roughly two hours. 

My first response might be to freak out, because I'm not sure I have two hours to walk this dog every day. Fortunately for me, activity doesn't just mean walking. It doesn't just mean running or playing fetch. Activity encompasses mental activity as well. And two hours doesn't mean one two-hour block of time. It just means that over the course of the day, for this particular need to be met, periods of activity –– alternating with periods of rest or down time –– should, again, add up to two hours. If I'm not sure that they do, I can keep a log with times, but if I have a general sense that we're spending about that amount of time in activity, then I'm probably good to go. 

Currently, simply keeping this one basic need in mind, our day is structured loosely like this: 

1. Get up, get dressed, let Dora out of her crate and outside for about twenty minutes. 

She usually goes out the back door like a pistol shot and runs at top speed to the back of the yard, where some smell (probably the next-door neighbor's cat) in the fence corner seems to attract her. For a little while after that she roves around in a state of fairly high excitement, which isn't surprising. She's been asleep all night and confined in her crate. When she gets up, she's fresh and full of beans. I let her freely blow off some of that energy before we do anything else. 

As her first energy starts to dissipate a little, she comes up to me. I give her a piece of kibble when she does, because I always want coming to me to be a positive, desirable thing. I'm good, I'm safe (see another need on that list), approaching me is always positive. This is a small but important opportunity to reinforce her still-developing consciousness that I am a safe person and that it's good to check in with me, give me her attention, listen to me. 

At this point, I scatter about half a cup of kibble in the grass for her to scatter feed. This comprises roughly half her breakfast (see "food," above), and she might take 10-15 minutes to sniff it all out. What's happening here –– nota bene –– is another manifestation of activity. For dogs, sniffing is a calming mechanism, helping to regulate their heart rate, but it's also akin to reading. Following a smell, finding something by smell, is a mental endeavor for a dog. It expends energy. They're both calm and pleasantly tired out, or on the road to being pleasantly tired out, when they finish. 

Depending on the time, I might just take Dora inside at this point and give her the rest of her breakfast in a Kong or puzzle toy. She has to chew and work to get the food out, which is a continuation of her period of activity –– though again, like sniffing, chewing is a calming activity. This is important, because I'm building a transition into the part of the day when I need to get down to work, and I need my dog not to be climbing the walls. Sometimes she's still kind of wired when she finishes, but at this point I know that it's not that she hasn't had some needed activity. She just needs some help continuing to regulate herself to a "calm" setting. 

At this point, I might give her something else to chew or play with and see if she'll settle down enough for me to sit down and start work. Sometimes she does lie right down on her bed by the kitchen table. Sometimes she keeps trying to climb on me and chew on my wrists and bite my clothes. If I'm sitting on the couch, sometimes she lies down with her head on my lap, but sometimes she walks on me and mouths me. If I see this latter behavior about to happen, I crate her. I stay in the room with her, but she's contained and can't rehearse the annoying behaviors. She's had her need for activity met for the time being, but now she needs some help to meet her need to calm down. 

Sometimes before we come inside, if I have some extra time, I will run through some training exercises with Dora. After ten to fifteen minutes of scatter feeding, she's able to focus as she would not have been when she first came outside, so I try to capitalize on that. We might play our attention game for a few minutes. I might work on sit-and-stay –– having her sit, then walking away increasing distances before returning to give her her treat. If I tried to do these things the minute we go outside, the exercises would be failures. She would be wound up and hungry and wouldn't have any self-control at all. But by this point in our first outside time of the day, after a little activity and eating, she can generally focus on lessons like this for a little while, like five minutes, before going in to finish her breakfast.  

2. Down time while I work. 

An hour or two when Dora is either crated or lying on her bed by the kitchen table or lying beside me quietly on the couch, depending on where I decide to sit to write. She's had a good period of activity, adding up to at least half an hour, including working on her Kong or puzzle toy to get her breakfast. It's fine for her to chill, fine for me to expect her to chill for this period of time, because her activity and nourishment needs have been met for the time being. 

3. More time outside/activity time.

After a couple of hours sitting down, I'm ready to get up and move, and so is Dora. One good thing about having her is that I'm a lot more motivated to spend time outside at regular junctures during the day than I would have been otherwise. Out we go for some playtime. I don't usually do any training exercises during this period (which could fall anywhere from late morning to early afternoon, depending on how early I started my day), just throw the ball for Dora and let her run and have fun. On the other hand, I'm never not teaching her things. I've habituated her, for example, to come to me, sit, and drop the ball in order to get a treat, though we're still working on not diving at my hand as I pick up the ball. Impulse control is very much a lesson in everything we do. 

Anyway, depending on the weather, we might spend half an hour outside playing fetch or just poking around the garden. There's not too much actual gardening to do this time of year, but with the advent of spring, I can imagine taking longer to do garden work while she plays and sniffs around me. This block of time is a good work break for me, and is another good dollop of activity to fill Dora's activity tank. 

4. Repeat downtime for Dora, work time for me. 

This time when we come in, I don't generally give her more food, but she does sometimes need help settling. One thing my trainer has noted, and I've certainly observed it to be true, is that for some dogs, physical activity begets more physical activity. You think you're going to calm your dog down by taking her out and encouraging her to run for twenty minutes, but no! When she comes inside, she's more hyper, not less. If you've had a toddler, you know this principle: the overtired toddler is the one you really have to watch out for. A large part of managing our periods of activity is knowing when to stop, and/or knowing when to transition from high-energy activity to settling-down activity. Another significant element is knowing when to enforce downtime. For Dora, this looks like being in the crate again. Sometimes I leave her in the whole time I'm working; sometimes I let her out after a little while, at which point she's calm and sleepy and will lie down voluntarily beside me without trying to use me as a chew toy. My main goal for her in these blocks of time, though, is to make that transition from activity to down time, and recognizing that I have to help her create that habit of behavior has helped me know what to do, i.e., make use of the crate. I like to give her opportunities to be near me, because she craves touch and closeness –– that is another need. But sometimes she needs help winding down to a point where she can be close without being a jerk. 

5. The whole day really is just a rhythm of these two things –– activity and downtime. 

I work for an hour or so; she rests for an hour or so. Then we go outside for twenty minutes to half an hour, maybe longer in the late afternoon, which is generally the time I choose to work on leash skills. Late afternoon works because by that time she's fairly calm and settled. Morning walks were always chaotic and stressful, because she was so wild after being crated all night, and I could never succeed in having her walk nicely on a loose leash. So we gave that up entirely and moved to the morning routine described above, and our leash work happens for about half an hour in the afternoon. 

I do structure leash work as I would any lesson. It's not just a matter of clipping the leash to the harness and off we go. I put her harness on in the house, then let her out to play in the backyard for a few minutes. She runs around, we might throw the ball a few times, then I scatter a little kibble for her to sniff –– again, the calming mechanism. She's gotten her kinks out, we're doing something deliberately calming as a transition activity, and then I clip the leash to the harness. We work on the leash, walking up and down the driveway, then up and down the block in front of our house, for as long as she can remain calm, in control, and at my side. I'm working to extend the time and range, but if I overshoot it –- she gets tired, is made anxious by loud car noises or a train going by a block away, is then distracted by smells, squirrels, people on the street –– then she fails. I'm trying not to set her up to do that. So we typically undershoot things, and I end the lesson before she starts to get to the point where she might fail.  Lately I've been ending in the front yard, because in the afternoon people tend to walk past our house, often with dogs, and I want to work on gentle exposure and counter-conditioning to things that trigger her reaction. So we might spend five minutes or so playing the attention game, then scatter-feeding when people walk by, so that she has a chance both to register their presence and calm herself in a way that gives her pleasurable feelings to connect to the presence of strangers. 

Then we go back to the backyard, I take the leash off, and she's allowed to run and play a little before we go back inside. 

Depending on the weather and general circumstances, we might be out anywhere from twenty minutes to forty-five minutes. My goal is eventually to be able to take a good hour's walk in the afternoon, but we're not there yet. In any event, this block of time works well for us as a period for stretching out into both physical and mental activity, with some extra challenges and learning. She's best able to focus at this time, especially when we've transitioned into the actual lesson period in the way I've described. 

6. Down time, dinner. 

Our schedule really isn't rigid at all. Some days I get going earlier, some days later. I have a hard time getting into my own work day before my husband leaves the house, so a lot depends on his schedule, too. But what I've described so far is our general rhythm, which can happen no matter when my own work day actually starts. 

After our long outdoor session with leash work, we might have more or less time before I need to begin dinner. Usually around 5 p.m. I give Dora her supper, again in a Kong or puzzle toy, which keeps her busy regardless of what I might need to be doing, and again gives her some calming activity, with her mind pleasantly engaged. Once I'm really into dinner prep, she goes into her crate again, because her curiosity about what I'm chopping or marinating becomes obnoxious. She doesn't need opportunities to rehearse obnoxious behavior, so the crate it is, with a chew toy to occupy her. She stays in the crate through our dinner (see "obnoxious," above). 

7. Quick outside time. 

In the evenings my husband and I like to read, talk, have a glass of wine and a cup of tea, watch an episode of a murder mystery, pray the rosary. While we don't mind the dog cuddling with us on the couch, we do object to the dog walking all over us, chewing us (actually, she doesn't chew my husband, just me), and generally inserting herself in unwelcome ways. Crating her again –– in the same room where we are, so she's not alone or isolated –– is always an available strategy. 

That means that before we launch the pleasant-after-dinner portion of our day, the dog needs a little more activity. She doesn't need that much, but a little breather and variety is a good thing. So I go out with her, and she roams around in the dark for a few minutes before we come in. If she's calm, she can sit on the couch with us. If she's all jangly and crazy, then she can have a chewy toy and some crate time, with us nearby. Once she calms down, we might let her out to sit with us, because again, she does crave closeness with her people. 

8. Bedtime

By ten o'clock, when we turn in, Dora is usually pretty sleepy. After all, by this point, she's generally had more than the recommended two hours of activity, though I haven't pushed too far over that line. Often she's passed out already on the couch beside me. After two and a half months in our house, she's probably trained herself to be sleepy around this time, because it is when we go to bed. 

Before I crate her for the night, I take her out again. This time we don't spend long, and I definitely don't play any games with her. I might scatter a last little bit of kibble for her to sniff out, but mostly I let her sniff around, do her final business of the day, and then come in. She goes into her crate, I turn the lights off and close the door, and we hear nothing from her until I let her out in the morning. 

As you can see, the organizing principle of our day is the dynamic between activity and down time, though even without each of those poles, there might be a variety of levels of activity and rest, and I'm paying particular attention to how we transition from one thing to another. Any block of time during our day has to encompass not only whatever the chief objective of that time block might be –– leash work, for example –– but also the transitions toward and away from that objective, the generation of attention and focus, then the release of tension when the objective of the time block is achieved. 

In this way, the dog is happy, and I also am happy, because when my day is structured, writing happens. Also, I have variety. I'm getting up and down. I'm inside and outside. I'm engaged in a number of different things. This is so much better than losing five hours surfing the net out of boredom, I can't even begin to tell you. I'm usually tired out at the end of the day, but I'm not drained or depressed. I sleep better. Life is generally better when the day has had a framework, a purpose, and a varied set of tasks and demands. 

Meanwhile, you can see, I hope, the application to your day as a homeschooling family. A similar structural dynamic to the one I've described here would be effective in almost any human situation, because it takes in the basic needs of the people involved, in the sort of cycle in which those needs occur. A person who is rested is ready for activity. A person who has been engaged in activity is ready to rest. A person who has been engaged in physical activity is ready to transition into mental activity, with special emphasis on the word transition. And so on. 

Charlotte Mason emphasizes the need for refreshment and variety in a school schedule. Her timetables alternate "disciplinary" subjects like math or foreign language with "imaginative/inspirational" subjects like history or literature, in which living books are read and narrated. This is an important principle, though one that I tweaked a good bit, with children who tended to go to pieces at transition points. It was easier for us to get all our "table work," like copywork and math, done in one chunk, while we were at the table, then to move to the couch for a chunk of read-and-narrate lessons. Still, even within those chunks, I might vary harder or easier lessons or readings, and make the subjects that bumped up against each other as unlike as possible: science after history, for example. 

But I think it's helpful, especially in the context of family life, to think in terms of the whole day, not just the formal learning schedule, and to try to establish a routine in which the family is migrating between the two poles of rest and activity. Actually, migrate might be a good word, suggesting as it does that each block of time entails a journey or a trajectory, with a beginning, middle, and end. 

Instead of "it's time for math," you're thinking, "We're entering an activity block that needs to include a lot of mental activity. How do I move us into mental activity so that we can focus?" Instead of "geography from 9:30-10," you're thinking in terms of a block that maybe begins at 9 and ends at 11 and is oriented toward activity generally, and for which you have the objectives of touching math, copywork, prayers, poetry, history, and science. Of course, if you need to extend the block past 11, you can. The good thing about time blocks is that their boundaries are fluid, as long as you don't get bogged down in any one place. But in thinking of the big block, you give yourself time to plan to get to a place where people can settle, focus, and learn, and then at scheduled intervals blow off a little steam, standing up and doing five jumping jacks between readings, walking like crabs from the table to the couch, or whatever you want to ask them to do that both releases some energy and keeps them in your desired activity zone. 

Later, after lunch, you can have an activity zone that's all play –– though it might include a mix of outdoor and indoor time, getting-out and putting-away of different kinds of toys or supplies. And you can also have a rest block, whether people think they're tired or not, in which the house is quiet, people are in their rooms listening to audiobooks or sleeping, and you have time, yourself, to be quiet and recharge. To the extent that you can, or can work toward, I would try to avoid spending that time lying down with children, taking their nap with them, or doing schoolwork with them. An older child or children who need to work with you might have a shorter rest time than little ones, so that you do have a little window of time in which to hear some narrations, have a one-on-one reading lesson, or whatever. 

In one sense, capitalizing on the baby's nap time for lessons can be a good move, and may certainly be a survival mechanism, but I would suggest at least setting yourself the goal of having some personal down time during the day, not waiting until everybody is in bed at night, and you're tempted to stay up half the night because a variety of your own needs have not been met that day. You might have a little story time with everybody right after lunch, maybe while you nurse the baby to sleep, then send them to their rooms/lay the baby down, and be alone for a while. THEN minister to anybody who needs ministering to, AFTER you have had a recharge period for yourself. 

I realize that all this is a lot easier to write than it is to do. I suggest these things as ideas and goals, because everybody has needs, including you. If you've structured the morning in such a way that you know you're touching everybody else's needs on multiple levels, then you can take a little time for yourself (again, as you can make it happen, and these things do ebb and flow) without guilt. 

Anyway, if you're wondering how to assign objectives to blocks of time in your day, you might think in terms of this kind of pattern. 

*************

Another thing my dog trainer says which has struck me as revelatory is this: 

Your dog is not responsible for his schedule. 

What does she mean by that? What she's talking about specifically here are those times when you want to sit and read or watch television, and your dog is bugging you to play. She's essentially giving you permission not to play with your dog every time he tries to initiate play, but she's framing that permission in terms of responsibility. You're the human, she means. You get to decide when it's playtime. Your dog will actually be happier when you are the one setting parameters, not him, because he doesn't know how to set parameters at all. He's a dog! He's just going to go on bugging you more and more, getting more and more wound up in the process, until you push back. 

The implication here is that it's better to push back from the get-go, proactively, than to find yourself reacting negatively in the moment when the dog won't leave you alone. I'm learning to use the crate proactively that way, so that Dora doesn't get to bug me, rehearsing those behaviors and winding herself up. I'm learning to structure her day so that her needs for activity and fun are met –– because when I know those needs are met, I'm more comfortable saying decisively that it's time to do something else. I'm not fighting with her, and I'm not teaching her who's boss. I'm just being the boss, like it's not even an issue. Granted, I have to be wise and compassionate. Whatever we're doing, I can't overdo it. I can't abuse the use of the crate. I can't ask her to do something that's going to be impossible or painful –– that's my part of the bargain. Whatever I require her to do has to be reasonable, just, and not punitive. Otherwise, she won't do it without a fight, in which case fighting would become our habit. Since that's not the habit I want to instill, I have to be prudent about my boss status, and both prudent and charitable in my dealings. 

There is a lesson here. It would be interesting to discuss how these ideas might play out in various situations with children. I do think they're absolutely relevant, and that some answers to implementing a Charlotte Mason school day successfully might be found in considering them. In fact, sorting the kinds of things she discusses in Volume 1: Home Education  into large categories, like Indoors and Outdoors or Activity and Refreshment, might be a way to begin getting a handle on the structure of your day in such a way that you end up with generous time blocks that encompass the meeting of a variety of needs, with their transitions. 

And at the end of the day, what matters is not so much that you checked off everything on the school checklist as that everyone's elemental needs have been met. 

*****

ADDENDUM: 

It occurs to me that in asserting that dogs need, on average, two hours of activity a day, my trainer is really trying to defuse the notion that for a dog to be happy and satisfied, he needs to be active all the time. She notes that for dogs in general, though different breeds might have slightly different rhythms, their wiring prescribes that they be really ON for short periods of time, then conserving energy the rest of the time. A hunting dog needs bursts of energy to pursue prey. A guarding breed needs bursts of energy for dealing with actual threats to whatever he's guarding (baaaa). But unlike most working human adults, dogs don't need to be on all the time. Their lives are more like tides, with their surge and ebb phases: energy bursts of some duration, then rest. 

Being on all the time is maybe unique to human adults, and maybe somewhat artificial. Certainly children are more like dogs, in their surges and ebbs, than they are like 21st-century adults in jobs. That is maybe something to consider when evaluating your expectations of your children, or when comparing your expectations with those of the schools your friends' children, or your children's friends, might attend. If you're paying attention to your children's natural needs to ebb and surge, you're probably already beating your friends' children's schools all to pieces.