Agility Question. Re: teeter

[Laurelin]

Originally Posted by SaraB

This. I totally agree to that it's how you teach them rather than what order you do it in. However, if your instructor has been successful this way, no reason to doubt her!

Oh I don't doubt her at all. I'm a lot more confident in her training than my past instructors, that's for sure. If anything, I think we move very slow compared to other training schools but I am impressed with how solid all the dogs in the class have gotten that fast. It will feel like we are doing little grunt work with little impact on agility as a whole then she'll string some things together and all the dogs do very impressively.

Very different from the old class where we spent the first day leading our dogs over obstacles on leashes.

Oh we are doing jungle gym stuff too. And contact foundations. I always forget that that is technically dogwalk work.

So far on teeter work, we did wobble boards then the bang game with the small, then the entire small teeter, then we started the bang game with the large. Of course Mia has already seen these obstacles and she keeps asking me why we're not going over the whole thing already.

[crysania]

Originally Posted by Laurelin

It kind of made sense to me that the dog's point of view the teeter and the dog walk would look very much the same.

I think they definitely do! We did a lot more with the dog walk and A-Frame early on and then started with the teeter. We first shaped end behavior (2on/2off) on the dog walk and A-Frame, then did some teeter bang games and 2on/2off on there.

Because Dahlia was confidently running the dog walk by the time we got to running the full teeter she very much confuses the two. Which means that on occasion she runs full tilt up the teeter and doesn't drop it until she gets to the very end. She ends up scrambling around or flying off at that point.

Once she realizes it's the teeter, she does it brilliantly. But that won't help much in trials when she has to do it right the first time!

This is something I need to figure out how to work on.

[crysania]

Originally Posted by Laurelin

Oh I don't doubt her at all. I'm a lot more confident in her training than my past instructors, that's for sure. If anything, I think we move very slow compared to other training schools but I am impressed with how solid all the dogs in the class have gotten that fast. It will feel like we are doing little grunt work with little impact on agility as a whole then she'll string some things together and all the dogs do very impressively.

Very different from the old class where we spent the first day leading our dogs over obstacles on leashes.

This sounds like our class! We were taking at least a few classes before we even got to jumps or anything. We never led any of the dogs over anything on leashes and everything was introduced slowly. But boy when you get out there the dogs have learned a lot of confidence and the handlers have learned how to get into decent position for various queues.

I remember feeling a little frustrated that we weren't just DOING it but now that we ARE doing it (we've been training for 2 years, started trials last November), I feel so happy we learned the way we did.