Cruel and Unusual Working Student Relations

By Kathryn Johnson, M.Ed.

There are two ways to learn to ride, the expensive, easy way, or the cheap, hard way. If there was a cheap, easy way to learn to ride, we’d all be Olympic medalists.

The cheapest way to learn to ride is to become a working student. Beware synonyms: volunteer, apprentice, work study. At summer camp, they’re called junior counselors and C.I.T’s.

I call it Free Labor.

Many trainers started as working students. Some trainer gave them a break. What a break., mucking stalls, cleaning water buckets, teaching beginners, any job the trainer couldn’t pay someone else to do. Eventually, working students may get to break horses, or their necks. I guess my favorite duty was sweeping cobwebs off the stable ceiling, I stared at the ceiling for so long, I got disoriented, felt like I was standing upside down on the ceiling, sweeping the floor. With the time and labor involved, I could’ve painted the Sistine Chapel. Other favorites were cleaning the trainer’s apartment and making him coffee. One guy went on a rampage and insisted every hoof in the barn was oiled, whether it need it or not. Fortunately this whim only lasted a month. Still, 40 horses , times 4 feet, times 7 days a week….

And for what? To ease the work load on some harried trainer who didn’t have time to sweep his ceiling let alone teach a "free" lesson to a working student. The trainer forgot the hard horrible hours slaved for that one hour weekly lesson. If there was a scheduling conflict, the first lesson to get bumped was the working student’s. After all a paying lesson takes priority over a non-paying working student. Hard work never beat cold, hard cash.

I got them all back in the end. My working students sift cat scat and dead grasshoppers out of the oat bin. They pull foot long manes on crazy thoroughbred yearlings. They wash my dogs, watch my kids, and teach my lessons while I sip the coffee that they made. Just kidding. Still, it makes me smile to jump off my horse and toss the reins to my very own working student. Now I’ve arrived.