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| Kelli Younker uses much of what she's learned from a lifetime of riding horses to help students with disablities. |
Showing horses is full of learning experiences.
Take Kelli Younker’s experience at a Southwest Quarter Horse Association show in Las Cruces, New Mexico, this past year.
“I went in for my working cow horse class, I did my dry work, I got a cow and I boxed it at one end,” she said. “I went to turn it on the long side of the fence, and I turned it the first direction. But when I turned back, my horse turned back so hard that my saddle slipped off.
“I kinda fell on my butt and stepped off at the same time. There wasn’t much I could do, so I put my saddle back on, tightened my cinch and just kind of waved.”
Younker won the class anyway, but she’ll probably never forget to double-check her cinch before going in the pen.
The 22-year-old New Mexico State University senior takes much of what she learns from riding and showing horses and uses it in her work as a student teacher at Mesilla Valley Training Center in Las Cruces, a school for at-risk students and students with disabilities.
“I find you can never get mad at a horse,” she said. “You just wind up back where you started. I’m always real calm, collected, lets see if we can bring it on in a different way. And students, sometimes they just need a little extra time.”
Younker teaches horticulture at the school, but this week, she concentrated on showing Turbo Charged Sugar, a 1996 sorrel gelding, in the working cow horse preliminaries. It was her first trip to the AQHA World Championship Show.
When the show is over, Younker will return to her teaching post and hopes to get the ball rolling to start an animal science and FFA program at the school. If all goes well, she hopes to have the school’s administration on board by the end of the semester, when she completes her student teaching.
But until then, she’ll continue teaching her students with the help of a little horse sense.
“They don’t have to get it right away,” she said. “It’s just great to be there and see the changes they go through.”
