REAL Learning

I was telling a story in the last couple of days that would seem to bear repeating, so here we go. 

When I was younger (Sounds a little like, In a galaxy far, far away.....) we spent a great deal of time raising and training horses.  This was a passion of my grandfather's and as such, it became one for both my sister and me.  We spent countless hours out on the hill at their house learning about the subtleties of training and understanding how a horse thinks and how they will react in any given situation.  We knew horses.  Somewhere along the line, it was determined that we should start showing horses at all of the little horse shows in the area. 

I remember the day very clearly.  We were at a show at a place called Hungry Valley.  This location was exactly what you would expect.  There was barely enough flat ground for the show ring and there was absolutely nothing "up scale" about it.  The owner of the property was Al (I can't remember his last name) and he was involved in everything.  In fact, even with all of the other duties that he had, he also acted as the ring man for the show.  For those of you that have never been around horse shows, the ring man is like a conductor on a train.  They get people to the right place and make sure that everything goes appropriately. Their primary job is to help the judge in the ring to get the classes in and out. 

I was showing my horse, Little Lady, in a halter class.  She was very well behaved and I did everything that could to to encourage her to show as well as possible.  I did everything that my grandfather had taught me.  It all went very well.  And then, an amazing thing happened.  I actually was called for one of the top five places in the class.  This was uncharted ground.  We had never talked about what you were suppose to do if you actually PLACED in a class.  I'm sure that we hadn't talked about this because there wasn't a lot of thought that it might actually happen.  So, I did the best that I could and followed others who had placed ahead of me to the "ribbon girl" to receive my ribbon.  I took my ribbon and moved toward the exit of the show ring, literally walking on air.  I had actually won something!

Then, Al caught me.  He stopped me in the ring to talk to me.  I had no idea what he was doing or what he wanted.  Did he not understand that I had celebrating to do?  I had just won a ribbon in a horse show. It was time to bask in the glow of victory.  In only a moment, he fixed that for me.  He needed to tell me that when you win in a class it is not only customary, but polite, for a young man to remove his hat when receiving a ribbon.  Who knew this?  Apparently, everyone but me.  I left the show ring and can guarantee that I never made that mistake again.  It was, and is ingrained in my subconscious, now and forever.

So, after telling this story earlier this week, I began to think about the fact that I tend to remember things more clearly if they are learned around an emotionally charged moment.  These emotions can occur on either end of the spectrum. The learning can happen because of the joy of victory at a horse show to discovering things you should never say while in a disagreement with someone of the opposite sex who is important to you.  I am sure you all have stories like this, and popular sit-coms like The Big Bang use this exact type of situation to make us laugh.  I also wonder if the military learned this and that is why the Marines train people as they do.  Have they learned that the things recruits learn while totally stressed are the things they will always remember?  Maybe this is common knowledge, but it is a new thought to me.  I'm not suggesting that we use this type of emotion charged learning in our school systems, but I do know that if you talk to my children, they would tell you the things that they will never forget are things they learned when dad wasn't happy.

So, that's just something to toss around today as you look at the way you learn, or the way you teach others.  I will also tell you that when my daughter was showing her horse, Nick, I made sure to tell her every rule about showing, and winning or losing, so she wouldn't have the same type of experience.  Judging from the look of the picture here, we hit the mark.