Teaching: course memorization 101

I will get to the tiling wrap up (finished added shoe molding, pained and caulked, don't want to let dogs in the beautiful sparkle room), but first a little about course memorization. Reading a great book, Embracing the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammet. He is autistic savant, with an amazing memory.
His website does a better job describing it than I would:
"Tammet explains that the differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated; his astonishing capacities in memory, math and language are neither due to a cerebral supercomputer nor any genetic quirk, but are rather the results of a highly rich and complex associative form of thinking and imagination."

He references lots of scientific studies and and it's more readable than some other I have tried to plow through lately. Just getting into it, but this part about memorization immediately caught my eye - Short term memory generally can capture between 5 and 9 "chunks" of information. So the magic number is 7 +/- 2. This was known in 1956 - and I am just catching up now.

And in agility, course memorization is all about short-term memory. So this is why trying to remember a 18 obstacle sequence as Jump #1, jump #2, Tunnel #3, Jump #4...Jump #18 doesn't work well!

But we can combine individual obstacles into groups, jump-jump-tunnel for instance, that will leave us with that 5 to 9 things to memorize, not 18!

For example:

This course could be broken down:
1. Tire-weaves
2. Tunnel-jump-tunnel
3. Curving line of 4 jumps back to the weaves
4. Jump-tunnel-jump-tunnel
5. Line of jumps out
which gives us five chunks.

It's helpful if you can think about something like section 3, as a long line of jumps, rather than thinking #7, #8, #9 triple, #10.

Of course you still need to remember which ends of tunnels and so on, but it makes sense

He also mentions the effectiveness of visualization. I have students close their eyes and tell me the course as they visualize running it. It's a great way to check if you know the course.
Visualization is hugely powerful.

Course memorization is really important - stopping because the handler is confused tends to seriously demotivates their dog when the handler disconnects to look around for the next obstacle. I have students immediately reward their dog if they get lost, and then find the course.
But with a couple of handlers who frequently get lost, I am going to have them do a "spot-check" before they start running ("close your eyes and tell me the course"). Especially as they are at the trialling/about to trial point.

Being able to remember your course is every bit as important as your dog being able to do a tunnel, and finding ways to help my students with that is something I need to work at more...