If horses could roll their eyes, the school master would be the king of that. I am admittedly still learning all the upper level movements, so of course I make mistakes…and LOTS of them.
Lucky for me the Schoolmaster is a pretty tolerant horse. He is also is a good horse to learn on because if I am close he will give it to me. This can also create lots of moments of hilarity. For example, I am working on my sitting trot. This is especially hard to work on with the Schoolmaster because his normal trot has tons of suspension making it hard to ride. So there I am working on my sitting trot and he can feel my hips and back moving much smaller then his trot so he naturally starts to slow down. So I know what I am doing is wrong at this point so I try to move my hips bigger, which causes me to be bad and try to balance with my hand a little, thus upping the mouth pressure (Bad OntheBit) and the size of his trot. What I was unwilling doing was asking him to do half steps…so he obliged. So there I am alone in the ring and my horse is half stepping underneath me. I quickly got him forward and started posting again, but that was a pretty big oops!
So he is a very willing horse…most of the time.
Sometimes though he decides that he doesn’t want to do something. And he looks less like the big Hanoverian in my eyes and a lot more like this…
When the school master doesn’t want to do something, or thinks that something is beneath him he throws a FIT.
I have decided that the Schoolmaster would enjoy the great outdoors and that he needs to learn to walk around in the field. The Schoolmaster thinks that this is a terrible idea and thus tries to show me how dangerous the world is by spooking and carrying on at every noise and movement. Sometimes even without the noises or the movement. In his quest to show me that demons are everywhere sometimes he will spook at the same thing for 45 minutes! He cracks me up.
I also tried to make him do a little bit of the trail course at my trainers barn and the Schoolmaster was so upset. How dare I make him do something that was so beneath him! Hahahaha! My trainer was watching us and she almost died laughing! The Schoolmaster planted his feet, not because he was scared, but because he didn’t want to do it. He let me get more and more frustrated at each obstacle until I was about ready to kill him. Then every single time he would turn back to look at me give me a look, and then walked calmly forward to the obstacle like it was nothing. If you could have seen the look of “this is the stupidest thing ever and I don’t like you for making me do it.” in his eyes you would have burst out laughing too!
So as much as I am learning about being a fancy pants rider I feel like I am teaching the Schoolmaster how to be a bit more of a normal horse.
A Horse and a Half 
Yeah, nothing like a been-there, done-that Schoolmaster to remind us who’s boss ;o) Enjoyed this post a lot. Keep up the good work. Laughter is healthy!
Even the most “educated” horse can learn new stuff when it’s different stuff. It doesn’t sound like the schoolmaster will ever be bored when you are up there -LOL
Grif thinks the outside world is a dangerous place too. He always prefers another horse to be in front when away from home….that way the monsters lurking in the bushes will eat the other guy first!
My next horse is going to be stupid. I’m tired of arguing when teaching stepovers or bridges or jumps or anything where they look back at you and say, “You do know that it is easier to walk around that, right?” Then they sigh and overexaggerate the movement just to be snarky! LOL