Dog Day. The reason we all come to class. We want to see what dogs are issued, how they are matched, and…oh yeah…we want our own dog.
Mystique is key to the Dog Day experience. The one thing that I haven’t seen any change in over the past twenty years is the restriction of any dog information prior to issuing. This means that students know nothing about their own dog, or any other in the training pool, until they receive their own. This is frustrating, but is founded in good practice.
As mentioned earlier, an admitted student will have more than one possible partner in a training string. Instructors may have a pretty firm idea of which dog will be issued to a particular student, but the final decision is not made until class. The instructors use an ever-shrinking period to form their final judgments. This is mostly attributable to the improved admissions process. All those interviews and mobility examinations pay off by bringing Dog Day earlier in the class cycle. For example, when I first attended a GDB class in 1994, Dog Day was four days after student arrival.
Today I received my dog in the early afternoon, and after only one instructor workout.
We’ll examine other methods for compressing the class schedule as the days progress. In short, it certainly seems that the time of the four-week first-dog classes are gone. This is undoubtedly better for everyone involved!
Issuing Time
The private bedroom pays off again on Dog Day. Imagine the awkwardness if an instructor dropped off your dog, but your roommate has to wait for another fifteen minutes. The first impression is so very important in making the bond quickly. Being concerned about a waiting roommate is not where ones mind should be.
To mitigate this, GDB used to issue dogs elsewhere in the building. This caused all kinds of logistical problems as new teams walked past each other in the halls with a minimum of bonding and skill. Add to this the fact that a large amount of equipment is issued with the dogs. Holding everything and handling an excited dog…Yeah, it was difficult.
Excited? Of course. The dogs are just as interested in you as you are in them. They like being in a building, they like you, they like to sniff EVERYTHING! How excited is your pet dog when they get to go in the car? Take it from someone with three guides-worth of experience; a ten-year-old guide dog is still excited to go somewhere new. Always remember, underneath all that training they are still dogs, and they never lose their personalities.
Let’s get back to Dog Day.
The private room concept wins again! In my case, my dog was issued in the privacy of my own room. Having the transfer in a place where I was one-on-one with an instructor and where I was comfortable made a huge difference. My dog and I had uninterrupted bonding time, until it was our turn for our first bit of guide work. This relaxation combined with immediate work started solidifying our relationship immediately.
The rest of the day was a blur of practical experience and information sessions. For the first-dog students, this was probably quite overwhelming. Enough of the tidbits from these lectures were unchanged that I wasn’t terribly lost. If you are preparing for a class, read and re-read your pre-class materials. They have most of the key points, which allows you to focus on detail during the actual sessions.
One more comment before signing off for the night. An instructor-to-student ratio of 2:1 like I am experiencing means that GDB can implement another philosophy change. Previous classes included the idea of paired teams, where two like-paced teams would, at times, work with a single instructor. Now, I and another student are bonded as a team. We have a single assigned primary instructor. I am interested to see how this consistency changes the experience.
Tomorrow we get off campus for the first time…Is it really only day 2?
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