I’ll bet my professor had never seen this before…heck, who am I kidding?

“When I first turned in my proposal, I wished to train Fiver to eventually jump through a hoop held approximately two feet off the floor. However, this was never accomplished, primarily due to an appalling lack of experimental control. The normal American household is by no stretch of the imagination an adequate laboratory; desirable conditions for conducting such experiments cannot be met completely. The main obstacle to Fiver’s training was the well-meaning family members who asked why there was a hula hoop in the living room. Since this 37-year-old student is not nor will ever be proficient at the abdominal intricacies involved in defying the gravity required to keep the hoop from crashing to the ground, I admitted it was a training device for the dog and a very important part of my experiment. Despite my heartfelt pleas to the contrary, my family, in an effort to make my experiment more successful, decided to “help” train the dog to jump through the hoop, and proceeded to chase him around the house with it. He was slightly afraid of this unknown object to begin with, but his fear intensified with each lap around the house. Fiver now greets this seemingly innocuous, pink plastic plaything with lots of barking and a fair amount of running away. It is this chasing that has caused an irrational (or perhaps rational, given how much he was chased) fear of the hoop that no amount of clicks or treats will assuage—at least this semester. If nothing else, I learned that experimental control is essential for faster, more productive learning.”

Surely with the staggering increase in returning and older students they will become more accustomed to such things...come to think of it, I got a perfect score on this paper. Was it because the information was actually useful, or was it scored higher for its entertainment value? We'll never know.