Category: Advanced Stuff ¤
  Author: Don Martin ¤
   Title: Dealing With Object Stress During Training ¤

First. It seems to me that you are trying to find a classroom analog of
"creativity training". I would suggest that you try to give your students
the mental equivalent of a box to play with and that you reward inovative
answers. Jon Bentley has an interesting short essay in his book
"Programming Pearls". The chapter is "#6, The Back of The Envelope". The
bad news is that he thinks creative responses to off the wall questions
may be very hard for some or even most people. Students ( mine at least )
love disasters. Look for examples in failures and don't hesitate to twist
a true story to fit your needs. Just don't claim that it is true. There is
an interesting book on engineering failures. Actually more than one book.
I think one of the titles is about "To Engineer is Human". I remember
another engineering text that had some fun questions. The one that I
remember is " How far can a duck fly?". The approximate answer was in
terms of energy reqired to gain altitude and glide ratios. This kind of
thing is tough to do but it can be rewarding.

Now for a human example that carries over to dogs. This is not in response
to your query. I have had a handful of students that describe themselves
as math phobic. They simply freeze and are unable to cope when faced with
any math problems. I more or less hit on an approach that was 100%
sucessful. I told each of them that I would give them a passing grade in
the course if they would do two easy things. 1. Put enough on paper to
show that they had attempted to do every homework problem. I didn't care
if it was right or wrong. I just wanted them to write down something that
they tried. The second thing was to put enough down on each test or quiz
problem that I could see that they had read the problem and made some
effort at doing it. As before. I didn't care if they were completely
wrong. I stressed that I didn't care about correct answers. I only wanted
to see that they were making a stab at it.

I never had to give any of these students a passing grade and most of them
ended up in the top third of the class. What would happen is that with the
pressure off, they would find a problem that they could work. It only
takes a couple and the dam would break. Once they realized that they could
do the work, they were overjoyed and really put in the effort. It was
amazing to watch. Of course I gave all the encouragement that I could but
this was minor. They were so happy at overcoming their own demons that the
course became a tool rather than an barrier.

In dog training when you have an unresponsive dog that freezes up, try to
get rid of the stress. Try to fit a tiny amount of training into any thing
that the dog seems to enjoy. Keep the bar low and the reward rate high.
Work on this to break both the dog and its owner out of old patterns.
Clicking silly behavior helps if you can get it but take anything. Silly
stuff is harder for the owner to keep them from getting up tight.

Happy Clicking
Don

Don Martin    (Widdershins Old English Sheepdogs)
  martin@biostat.washington.edu