Teach your children well

I have just finished reading David Wroblewski's novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which I enjoyed (even after I realized what the ending was going to have to be), because there was such understanding in it of dogs and of the relationship created by teaching and training.

Some of you have written of your enjoyment of David Finkle's article (see previous post). Here are two paragraphs from the novel that speak perfectly of what I believe teaching can and should be.

...there was nothing in a dog's character that couldn't be adapted to useful work. Not changed but accommodated and, ultimately, transformed. That was what people didn't understand. Unless they had worked long and hard at it, most people thought training meant forcing their will upon a dog. Or that training required some magical gift. Both ideas were wrong. Real training meant watching, listening, diverting a dog's exuberance, not suppressing it. You couldn't change a river into a sea, but you could trace a new channel for it to follow.

Elsewhere in the book, Wroblewski writes:

[Trudy] didn't think that the lessons from dog training always transferred to people, but it was just the nature of things that if you punished anyone, dog or boy, when he got close to a thing, they'd get it in their head the thing was bad. She'd seen people ruin dogs too many times by forcing them to repeat a trial the scared the dog or even hurt it. Not finding a variation on the same task, not coming at things from a different angle, not making the dog relish whatever is was that had to be done, was a failure of imagination.

Failure of imagination may be the eighth deadly sin. Especially in a teacher.