I have no idea how to title this

So tonight was a good lesson.

We started out with a little walking and trotting (including some twenty meter circles) to warm up and then Christina had us go back to walking and was like, "at B, I want you to go into a canter," because we've been working on walk-to-canter transitions but still be doing most of our cantering from the corners. So it's something of a big step to do them in the middle of the long side, instead. Once we were cantering reliably, she had me go up into half seat. Then we did it all the other direction. Once we'd done that a few times, she set up the poles on the ground so they described a twenty meter circle in the middle of the ring.

Like so:

_
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Except, you know, prettier than that. :)

Anyway, then she had us canter again on the rail and then had me bring him in and go along the poles. We cantered our first circle! (well, it wasn't overly pretty, but first tries rarely are :) )

Then we got a bit of a break from the cantering and she had us do "dressagey" stuff with her calling out the movements. So...like working walk from A to X, halt at X. Working walk to C, track right, rising trot at M, sitting trot from K-X-H...and so on.

There was a bit more cantering but it was starting to get obvious at this point that Kieran was getting tired (we'd done a LOT of it earlier in the lesson, more than we usually do) and I was getting sloppy (also tired. I haven't been riding regularly). So, for the last few minutes of our lesson, partly to let him cool off and partly to work on something else, Christina set up the poles to make an "L" shape with a corridor between them.

Like:

_______
| _____
| |
| |
| |

So we'd ride through it, then back up straight till we get to the corner and I'd have to turn Kieran while he was backing so we could back straight out the other side. There was an obstacle like this at the judged pleasure ride we went to recently and it was the only one we had any real issue with. But that was mostly because it's not something we've done a lot of work on (mostly I've worked on getting him to back straight, not turn while backing!) and I rushed him through it at the ride.

Then, once we got that, Christina made the angle a sharper one. Maybe more like 80 degrees instead of 90.

He got it pretty well. I mean, he caught on to what we were doing very quickly and he just listened to me well (it's amazing how much easier this is when I'm taking my time and really thinking about what we're doing. *facepalm*). After doing it a couple times each direction, we pretty much ended the lesson there. Good pony!