Apr 25 2009
THE Training Secret
What’s the secret to teaching anyone anything? Your dog, your kids, your pet python? A brain is a brain, and the key is the same for all of them.
Motivation.
Think back to school (if you’re not still in it). Which class did you do worst in? Was it, perhaps, the one where you simply could not care and could not pay attention? The one where you sat there thinking, “I will never need this, I will never use this, and the teacher’s not even nice”? What were you missing? Motivation.
Motivation can be negative. Motivation can be avoiding the yank on the collar, the nagging, or the electic shock. Motivation can be knowing what your parents are going to think of that grade. Again, how did it work for you? Did you grind through, or did you somehow magically promote the Ick subect to Favorite subject?
That’s what I thought.
Motivation can also, of course, be positive. In the class where you were genuinely interested, where the subject seemed like what you wanted to do for the rest of your life, you paid attention. You probably did pretty well, even if your natural talents maybe didn’t measure up to some of your classmates’. In dog training, the parallel is toy and food training — get the dog to do what you want, and he gets what he wants. If he has an innate love for the subject, or for pleasing you, so much the better, but even if he doesn’t he’ll be willing to make the bargain, just as many of us do to get our paychecks.
However, there is also such a thing as overmotivation. I’d be willing to bet that a teenage boy who is rewarded for a lesson with sex, for instance, isn’t going to remember much of the lesson by the next day. Some dogs are overmotivated by the simple tennis ball. Sure, she wants the ball enough to hover three feet off the ground and scream, but is she thinking? Sniffing? Nope. Training time goes up when motivation is too high.
So here’s the secret: find the motivator that your training subject likes enough to work for, but not so much he or she cannot think. I’m working on this with Wanda The Puppy. Scratches? Nice, but nothing she can’t get by looking cute enough. Cheese? Chicken? Hah — the sharks’ feeding frenzy has nothing on Wanda with a yummy before her nose. Liver treats? They’re nice and crunchy and slow her down a little, and since she likes them a little less than the people food but they’re a little more special than just petting, we have a fighting chance of communication here. You have to know your student.
A college professor teaching about opera once put down the chalk, waved his arms, and shouted “Sex and death! It’s all about sex and death! When you understand that, you understand everything!” Suddenly he had a roomful of wide-awake college students wondering if they wanted to learn a little Italian. Make it interesting!
