Learning Issues

A friend and I went to hear a woman named Jennifer Arnold give a talk the other night. Arnold trains dogs to be service animals–to assist paraplegics by opening drawers, to signal a deaf person when there’s a phone call, and so on. For twenty years she has been teaching dogs to obey and to perform such helpful functions. Her main point was that you start by understanding the way dogs learn best—through their innate and all-important wish to please their human “person.” And the primary way to let a dog know that he has pleased you is to feed him as soon as he begins to obey, first with actual food treats, and later with words of praise. If you have a grip on these two principles, and plenty of patience, you can go far with a dog.

She also spoke about how certain assumptions concerning a dog’s nature create unnecessary difficulties. To assume that a dog is wolf-like and in rivalry with you for the alpha position, in her experience, leads only to frustration and neurosis for the dog (and possibly the owner). The dog already knows you’re in the alpha position; after all, you control his food. What could be more clear?

After the talk, my friend told me a story about Alex, an African gray parrot who became famous for his intelligence.  He had mastered a large vocabulary and was even able to put words together into meaningful unique sentences. One day, so my friend’s story went,  the scientist who worked with Alex spent the morning trying to teach him phonemes—the spoken components of words (for example, the phonemes for “teach” go something like “tuh . . .eee. . . chuh.”) She was in a hurry, so instead of rewarding him at the end of each mini-lesson, she hurried on to the next thing, ignoring his expectant “Want a nut.” Finally, after this had gone on for some time, Alex fixed an eye on her and intoned once more “Want a NUT . . . nuh . . .uh. . . .tuh!” The scientist realized that Alex had probably gotten the point some time earlier.  (I haven’t been able to verify this tale, but Alex’s ability to discriminate objects in terms of color, size, quantity etc. is legendary.)

Moving on from dogs and parrots, there’s the question of  how and what we  human beings need to learn. For me that inquiry opens up on the aikido mat. As a student of aikido, I have this vision of the humanity that aikido could teach me, the spirited movement in sensitive and effective relationship with another person or group of people that I’ve had a glimpse of at the dojo.  And sometimes I can see for myself what gets in the way of that–including striving for the alpha position! But at other times, I don’t have a clue, which is where a teacher is needed for personal coaching. There’s no point in his telling me something that I can remind myself of, or that I already have internalized, and there’s no point in showing me something I’m not ready for. But that moment when he or she says “What you’re trying feels forced because you’re looking down at your hands”–that’s an effective teaching moment.  I’ve been helped to have an impression of the way things are, just then.

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