Perfect Polly Goes To School

Never thought I'd see the day I would attend a PetSmart training class.  After all, I have been training dogs since the late '60's!  However, training classes are not readily available in my area, and my Rally classes are on summer hiatus, which ordinarily do just fine for my socialization needs as well as training my puppies for rally titles!  I still felt the need to enroll my newest puppy in some form of a puppy class to ensure that her upbeat and outgoing personality would stay that way!
When I enrolled in the class, I asked how many dogs there would be and was told "we limit our classes to 4-6" so I was alarmed when I entered the 8' X 12' classroom the first night and learned there were 9 puppies (and a 10th puppy was added on week two...) I was even more alarmed when I assessed the classmates and saw two Labs, a Shiloh Shepherd, and a Dobe....all roughly the same age as my puppy (3 months) and all of whom were borderline ADHD and attached to frazzled military moms with toddlers at home.  Then the instructor informed us she had only been teaching a year and had no prior training experience.  To me, those four puppies on their own would make a full-time class for any experienced trainer.  I also figured that the rest of us with quieter, mild-mannered puppies would pretty much be left to our own devices and would be ignored.  Lovely.....but since I really only wanted socialization for Polly and had no other goals than for her to be happy to interact with the world, I gritted my teeth and tried to remain calm in a group of lunging and barking puppies.  Polly laid on her tummy on her blankie at my feet and watched them behaving badly and wagged her tail.
We just completed week four of our six week series, and I am very pleased to report that for the most part, this class has actually been reasonably successful.  The four "unrulies" are still wild and crazy but you can see that progress is being made.  Most of the time we receive accurate information (although when I commented last week that Polly was entering a 'fear phase' and had been nearly run over by a shopping cart that scared her, the instructor said "well, when she grows out of her fear phase, she won't be afraid of shopping carts because of that experience."  uh.....OK.....
One moment of humor from last night's class.....the instructor held Polly on a long line and I went to the end of an aisle and called her to me.  She came at a dead run each time (considering how difficult it is with her huge paws and long floppy ears!) I told her:  "look at you, running lickety split!"  When we gathered back in the training room after the exercise, the instructor stressed to us how important it was to establish a distinctly different recall command that wouldn't encourage the entire off-leash dog park to come running when you call your dog.  Then she told everyone how my command was "lickety split"...I had to laugh...can you just see standing out there callling "lickety split" to your dog? :)