Folding Paper and Dog Training
When I was 19, I had a part time job at an excellent daycare, working with four year olds. One memorable  rainy day, I brought a paper airplane book to work. I folded airplanes all afternoon long and the children quietly watched, held spell bound. Later that year, I went to Toronto to visit a friend, bought a book on origami, and spent much of March Break in the Toronto Public Library teaching myself how to fold very complex models of animals. I became hooked on origami. At different points in my teaching career, over the past 26 years, origami has come out of my teaching tool box - to the delight of four year olds to twenty somethings! 

I've done a lot of folding at school over the past few weeks. I used folding the classic paper crane as a vehicle for getting a little group of nine year olds interested in writing. We folded and wrote about folding. Then we took our show on the road and taught Grade two and Grade six how to fold paper cranes. As the children grew in their understanding of the folds and in their ability to write the procedural steps involved with creating the model, they expanded their oral language abilities along with their writing skills. 

Last Friday, I watched my little nine year olds teach the big six graders how to fold the crane. There were a few spots where I needed to jump in and help them teach and I found myself musing on what makes great instruction. 

At this point, I think that as long as someone has; just below to average or above processing abilities, their sight, fingers and is over the age of four, I could teach them how to fold a crane. I can back off and give minimal instruction to students who do not need much instruction. If support is needed, I can say with confidence that I know every pitfall a person could potentially fall into with this model. I have little tricks to make the tricky parts easier, I am alert to where confidence can be lost; I know when the paper will act up! I have smoothed out my instructions over years and years of being asked to repeat my instructions, or worse yet, students giving up. 

Paper is flat, it is yielding, it is one dimensional. Dogs and the people who seek help to understand them, are none of these things. But, as time goes by, to some extent, patterns are emerging.  I find myself able to explain, to smooth out rough patches and to predict where relationships will derail. I am starting to have a large enough inventory of canine and human behaviour lodged in my mind's library that I can make many connections pretty quickly and efficiently at this point. See the dog, see the human, instruct through the lens of experience and always from the heart and it is possible, on the whole, be able to remodel relationships one instruction at a time.