Progress

At the barn where I teach our riding year is broken down into several “semesters”. We ride regularly for a few months and then take a break. It’s nice because it gives the riders, volunteers, instructors, and most importantly the therapy horses a few weeks to relax before jumping back into their scheduled classes.

For me, the ending of a semester is always bittersweet. As I said before, the break is nice. It allows me to have some free time to pick up more hours at my other job, hang out with friends, or just spend a day relaxing with a book instead of running to the barn. But it also, for me, means that we are already inching closer to our long winter break when the days get too cold for most of our students to ride. The end of a year’s classes is always sad for me, but I do appreciate not having to freeze my toes off in ten degree weather while I teach!

One of the most amazing things about the semester breaks though, is being able to stand back and look at the past weeks as a whole and seeing just how much each rider has PROGRESSED. For me, these past months have been a time of big change for not just my students, but myself as well. You see, I’m what you would call an “intermediate instructor”. I have the ability to work with some of the more advanced riders, but I choose to work with the riders that are in level one classes because that is where I feel my strengths lie.

This year, I was charged with instructing a new class for our center: a step up class. This was basically a class made up of our riders that are ready to move out of the beginner phase, but aren’t quite ready to ride off lead without sidewalkers. These riders are all ready to start working on the skills of riding a horse; things like: steering independently, riding with one or no sidewalkers, trotting more, etc. My goal with this class was to start helping them learn the skills necessary to hopefully be bumped up into the next level of classes where they would ride with spotters off the lead.

I was extremely excited to start working with the step up group, especially when I saw several of the students I had had in my classes the year before would be involved. However, I felt my style of teaching had to change drastically to be able to accommodate this new level of riders. When I first started teaching, I played a lot of games during my lessons (and I’m not going to lie, I still use games in many of my lessons). This time around, however, I had students that needed me to teach them the basic skills of riding a horse, not spend an entire forty-five minutes alternating between every game possible in my teaching toolbox. Instead, I started finding that this group was teaching me to PROGRESS from just having a good time in my lessons to actually teaching riding skills. In this first semester my students and I have worked on steering, leg aids, “woahs”, looking where we are going, trotting, and so much more. I have loved the challenge teaching this amazing group of individuals has brought to me!

More amazing than the changes I have seen in my own teaching style though, is the PROGRESS I have seen in my students since the beginning of the riding year. From learning to ride (and love) a new horse, to starting to understand posting at the trot, to riding with no sidewalkers for the first time ever; my students have continually amazed me these past few weeks by just how far they have come. I hear them during class encouraging each other to try a new skill that might frighten them and cheering when their fellow rider does it. Their love and support for one another warms my heart and reminds me of just why I became a riding instructor in the first place. I love to see PROGRESS in everything I do in life, but especially in the lives and abilities of the students I teach!