Dogs learn to sit more easily than their masters.

From Alfred’s journal

The obedience class meets Saturdays in the corner of the field by the ballpark, and I watch it from the backstop because nobody looks up at a backstop. A woman in a red jacket had a young shepherd who sat the third time she asked, then sat again, then sat without being asked at all, waiting on her. She kept moving. She checked her phone, she shifted her feet, she looked over at the other handlers to see how she was doing. For years I thought the trick of that class was getting something across to the animal, some patient translation into a language without words. Dogs learn to sit more easily than their masters. The dog held it a long while, looking up, and I could not tell whether he was being good or just resting.