in which I swear off permissive parenting

Oh, brother.

I'm sure I've mentioned, on occasion, that Andrew (autistic, turning 14) is a holy terror.

This summer I'm in a panic because things are way out of hand. By this age, Jimmy (autistic, just turned 21) was a Good Citizen. Not at school, where he still had a lot of problems, but at home and in public. Andrew is the opposite. He's at his best in school, though he's not great there. He's chronically difficult here at home and impossible in public.

Over the past year it's become obvious that we've dropped the ball. But I didn't know how badly we'd handled things until today.

Last week we dropped Andrew off at a camp for developmentally disabled and physically handicapped kids. It was a scene. The nurse argued with Ed about the medications, which were improperly labeled, she said, and I tried to deal with Andrew, who went into a massive tantrum. I held my ground: I had my clicker! Miraculously, I managed to get him back on track using a combination of stare-downs followed by clicks the instant there was a break in the shrieking, but not until everyone there had acquired a look of polite horror on his face & the elderly gentleman manning the canteen had said, "Olivier is going to have his hands full this week." (Olivier was Andrew's assigned aide; he's from France.)

We didn't think camp was going to work.

We figured we'd hear from them the next day, asking us to come get him.

Then, when we didn't hear from the camp (apart from the nurse, who called to report that the local CVS had mislabeled the medicine bottles so we still didn't have properly labeled medication), we figured when we picked Andrew up we'd be told that he wouldn't be invited back.

That's not what happened.

We drove up to the camp and there was Andrew, calmly hanging out with the rest of the campers and the counselors, all of whom looked cheerful and relaxed.

They brought us papers to sign, which included their notes on Andrew's behaviors, things he needed to improve, etc. The standard end-of-camp form they give all the parents.

The report: Andrew had no behaviors at the camp, and there was nothing to improve.

No behaviors and nothing to improve for a whole week.

The counselors were hugging him and saying goodbye; other counselors were strolling past calling out, "Goodbye, Andrew!"

The young European counselors all took this for granted, but the nurse was openly amazed. She's middle-aged & raised a handicapped child herself. "We had a very good week," she said, wonderingly. As she was running through the list of rational acts she had and the staff had witnessed, Andrew wandered off into the kitchen behind her office and picked up an empty soda can, & the nurse said without missing a beat, "Andrew come back from there." He put the can down, came back, and waited politely while she finished talking to us. (We need a nurse.)

The counselor sitting beside her took my email address so she could send me a photo of Andrew hugging another counselor -- a pretty blonde from England -- and then the two of them told us all about their weekend program during the school year, and they wrote out every date for us by hand on a piece of scratch paper so we could be sure to apply for spots for Andrew.

Nobody said anything about a weekend program the day we brought him to camp.

Within 5 seconds of our leaving the nurse's office and heading to the car, Andrew started in. First with the "bad sounds" and the dark face. Stage One.

I said, "This is going to be exactly like The Miracle Worker. He spent all week in a cabin, and he's perfect. Now he's going to drop his napkin on the floor." I said the same thing to a counselor in the parking area, and he wrote down the title of the movie so he could rent it.

Sure enough.

We needed to get something to eat before heading back, so we parked in front of a deli and went inside. Andrew made a beeline for an occupied table and snatched up a little girl's beverage, which I snatched right back, of course, but he'd been so fast I hadn't been able to get out in front of him to prevent his getting it in the first place. A bad sign.

We went to the counter to order, and pretty soon Andrew was making his little warning sounds. He was getting his bad look, too.

So I took him to a table and we sat down, but he didn't drink his juice or eat his chips, just sat there looking stony. Another bad sign.

Pretty soon he was making more of his warning sounds, and picking at the sides of his temples; that's Stage Two. Meanwhile I was clicking away and lavishly praising every lull in the action, but it was no use. He started slapping the sides of his head, and within 10 minutes all told he was doing his war whoops and the guttural vibrating scream that has to be heard to be believed and he had crashed his heavy wood chair over onto the tile floor.

With Andrew it's always the wind-up and then the pitch.

I hauled him out to the car, pushed him inside, shut the door, and went back inside the deli.

Andrew sat in the car for a minute or two, then opened the door.

I went back out and asked him if he was ready to be calm. Then I clicked him when he was calm for a second, calm meaning "not shrieking."

That was a bust. When he's ticked off, Andrew interprets praise for good behavior as the A-OK sign. Praise is the releaser that lets him go back to doing the thing you're trying to get him to stop doing by praising him for not doing it. [see: release word] Behaviorists have a term for this, but I forget what it is. So, having been momentarily calm, and having received his click, Andrew reeled back to the beginning of his wind-up (bad face, warning sounds), and I put him back inside the car & closed the door.

He opened the door again, set one foot out on the curb. No sounds. I clicked. Still no sounds. OK.

We went back inside, sat down, and started over. Andrew was wearing his dark look, but he wasn't saying anything, so that was fine & Ed by that time had finished up ordering & he sat down, too. So far so good.

The owner of the place came over and introduced himself. "Stay as long as you like," he said.

We weren't expecting that, and Ed said later it was a good omen. The owner said his 6-year old is autistic, and he's carried him shrieking out of Applebee's more times than he can count. Every time he carries the kid out, he leaves fifty bucks on the table because he knows the bill isn't going to be more than that. So he always spends fifty bucks at Applebee's.

That was funny to hear, because I have never, in my life, overpaid for something just because an autistic kid of mine happened to be shrieking and carrying on while I tried to settle a bill. That's probably why Jimmy ended up being a Good Citizen, come to think of it. Andrew's problem is that we ran out of energy and will somewhere along the line, and we stopped taking him anywhere instead of slugging it out with him in public.

Meanwhile, sometime during the Applebee's conversation, Andrew had decided to turn normal. When I looked at him again he was sitting cheerfully in his chair, eating his chicken fingers and drinking his juice. Then he threw his trash in the container and carried the leftovers to the car, after Ed and I were finished, too.

Time to download my copy of Grammar Trainer and get to work.




I still cry every time I see this scene.

update:

Susan S suggested I post the breakfast scene. I saw this movie so many times when I was a kid I practically have a scene-by-scene breakdown committed to memory. For people who don't know the history of the film, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke starred in the play on Broadway before making the movie. They did the breakfast scene 6 times a week.




eureka (on permissive parenting)

why aren't more people going to college?

Let's ask Tyler Cowan.

I can only conclude that Altonji, Bharadwaj, and Lange have never taught Introduction to Composition to a large group of freshman in a public university in the United States. Anyone who has taught such a class -- or for that matter talked to anyone who has -- will have some inkling why more people are not going to college. Herein lie the roots of growing inequality -- on the bottom side at least -- and don't let anyone induce you to take your eye off the ball by playing switcheroo and bringing up the (separate) topic of the growing wealth of the top one percent.

factoid: I myself have taught such classes.

Clicking around the web, reading posts about The Race Between Education and Technology, I fear we are in danger of embarking upon yet another round of research papers and newspaper op-eddery finding that parent education predicts, causes, and fully accounts for the educational attainment of children:

Research summarized in Cunha and Heckman (2007) suggests that part of the explanation [for why the supply of skills is inelastic] might be that parental investment during early childhood shapes the potential to acquire additional skills later in life.

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth

That's the kind of thing that will lead directly to Universal Pre-K, if the edu-world has its way.

Which it will:

It is well documented that people are diverse on a vast array of abilities, that these abilities account for a substantial portion of the variation found across people in their socioeconomic success, and that persistent ability gaps across children from various socioeconomic groups open up at early ages before children enter school. The family plays a powerful role in shaping these abilities through genetics, parental investments and through choice of child environments. From a variety of intervention studies, it is known that ability gaps in children from different socioeconomic groups can be reduced if remediation is attempted at early enough ages. The remediation efforts that appear to be most effective are those that supplement family environments for disadvantaged children. Cunha et al. (2006a), henceforth CHLM, present a comprehensive survey and discussion of this literature.
Cunha, Flavio and James J. Heckman, “The Technology of Skill Formation”, IZA DP No. 2550 (pdf file)

Once we've got 3 year olds constructing meaning in public pre-schools staffed by accredited teachers, we can wave good-bye to the skills gap.

Glancing through the Heckman paper, I can see the shape of things to come. Declining high school graduation rates will be viewed as a species of disability, the prescribed treatment being early intervention: universal pre-K.

School has no effect on children born to uneducated parents, but pre-school will.

Because it's early.

I wonder what Heckman thinks of Levitt and Fryer....

Compared with the results of previous studies, our findings provide reason for optimism. We find smaller achievement gaps, in both the raw and the adjusted scores, for children born in the early 1990s than others had found for earlier birth cohorts. It could well be that, as compared with earlier generations of students, the current cohort of blacks has made real gains relative to whites. Indeed, recent cohorts show smaller raw black-white gaps across multiple data sets—a truly promising sign.

Once students enter school, however, the gap between white and black children grows, even after controlling for observable influences. We speculate that blacks are losing ground relative to whites because they attend lower-quality schools that are less well maintained and managed as indicated by signs of social discord. Though we recognize that we have not provided definitive proof, this is the only hypothesis that receives any empirical support.

Falling Behind
Steven Levitt & Roland Fryer

Heckman doesn't seem too crazy about Levitt. So perhaps he disagrees with Levitt's & Fryer's paper.

Be that as it may, I despair.

Has none of these people had a child in public school recently?

Or spoken to a person who does?

Has none of them thought about the implications of rising within-group inequality?

[E]ven within groups with the same level of education, the gap between high and low earners has widened, too. Indeed, the more advanced the degree, the wider the gap becomes. A satisfactory theory must therefore explain not only why the demand for college educated workers has risen but also why "residual" inequality has increased, that is, the part that is unexplained by education and other observable factors.

Economic Inequality in the United States

The "powerful role" I personally have played in my typical child's educational attainment did not begin at birth and end at age 3. Those were the easy years.

Within-group inequality is not a mystery to me.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

What Shamu Taught Me...

...about a Happy Marriage

My Karen Pryor dog treats and target stick have arrived, and my dogs (Surfer and Abby) are liking the clicker, liking the treats, and are happy to touch their noses to the target or drop their bodies down to the floor.

Neither has, as yet, experienced a lightbulb moment.

I'm gathering my courage to try this with Andrew. His behavior has got to get under control this summer. When Ed gets back from L.A., we're all going to have a go at the training game.



trainer's motto: It's never the animal's fault.

U = E x V / I x D

Steel developed the equation U = E x V / I x D, where U is the desire to complete the task; E, the expectation of success; V, the value of completion; I, the immediacy of task; and D, the personal sensitivity to delay, as a way of mathematically mapping a given individual's procrastination response. So, for example, my desire to finish this article is influenced by my relative confidence in writing it well and the prospect of a paycheck as well as a looming deadline and my inherent desire to go home at the end of the day. "You're more likely to put something off if you're a very impulsive individual," Steel says. But, "if you only work at the last minute, time on task tells."

Of course, this does not explain why humans would procrastinate in the first place, but it is certainly not a new problem. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing in 800 B.C., averred "a man who puts off work is always at handgrips with ruin" and the divine incarnation Krishna singled out procrastinators for special scorn in the Bhagavad Gita. Nor does it explain why procrastination seems to be on the rise--afflicting as many as 95 percent of students and at least 15 percent of adults, according to two recent surveys.

Why Do Today What You Can Put Off Until Tomorrow
by David Biello
Scientific American
January 15, 2007

Hah!

I can tell you exactly why procrastination is on the rise.

projects

Projects are long-duration behavior. Everyone procrastinates long-duration behavior, even chickens. Maybe especially chickens; who knows? Turn K-12 into 13 years of project-based, collaborative learning, et voilà! Epidemic levels of procrastination! This generation will emerge from high school suffering the customary math phobia, and on top of that they'll have writer's block and chronic problems with procrastination and time-management.

Once they're all settled into lifelong therapy and/or AA, we'll need a whole new slew of child-centered reforms to fix the schools.


Procrastination Central

angry wife of administrator

from palisadesk

angry teacher

I think we should invite this man to join our Karen Pryor club.


see also:
yelling doesn't work

Thank You, Karen Pryor

After hearing Catherine talk about Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog, I decided it was time to give it a go. (I gotta say, Catherine, your recommendations are usually spot on.)

My local library didn't have it, but I was able to track it down via state-wide interlibrary loan. This is actually a good thing -- normally, I can buy a book or get it from the library, and then I put it off and never really get to it. But -- interlibrary loan! No renewals! Get cracking!

I started it this morning during my warmup on the treadmill, and only got about 10 pages in before I started running and it got too bouncy to read. Finished up, checked in with the family, wasn't thinking about it, then went to go take a shower.

Once in the shower -- BAM!

I got it.

When I'm depressed, I engage in "retail therapy," and I'm training myself to be depressed. When I'm nervous, I eat treats, and I'm training myself to be nervous.

What am I training my kids to do? What am I training my husband to do?

Catherine -- if you set up a discussion group, I am so in.


(This, admittedly, may seem a bit simplistic. But it was quite the "aha!" there in the shower.)

bring back self esteem

I've mentioned a couple of times that I regret the fact that "character education" has replaced "self-esteem" as the psychosocial focus of public schools.

Of course, I have to assume that in practice any given school's definition of "high self esteem" may have been "self esteem on our terms," which in turn probably meant low self esteem, not high. But I still prefer self-esteem to character as a school's guiding principle.

Character education, in my experience, has been quite punitive. It almost has to be given its premise, which is that the character students have developed at home needs improvement -- and that the character of school personnel doesn't.

This is where the Bible has it right.

I'm not crazy about the notion of children as inherently more flawed than grownups to tell the truth. Very young children possesss all kinds of sweet, altruistic impulses along with the usual obnoxious impulses. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to see kids as innately good in a fundamental sense.

I'd like my kids to attend a school in which administrators, teachers, and support staff feel the same.


middle school and depression

Which brings me to middle school.

The difference between a middle school and a junior high, we have repeatedly been told, is that middle school "educates the whole child."

What does that mean?

It means, first of all, that academics often take a back seat to "character" education activities. Middle school kids here are required to attend a character ed assembly each and every month; to my knowledge the school has never, not once in 2 1/2 years, staged an assembly devoted to an academic or intellectual topic. Ed, reading Martin J. Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 last summer, wondered whether character education is always be opposed to academics. I think it may be.

Beyond this, I am coming to feel that character education, as implemented by so many of our public schools, is incompatible with the creation of a positive school environment. You don't hear Karen Pryor talking about "bad" horses and "bad" dogs -- quite the opposite. Pryor's view of dog aggression is: "It's just a behavior!"

Middle school kids would be far better off if middle school behaviors like not knowing how to keep track of 6 or 7 different courses at the same time were not viewed not as a sign of poor character.

Disorganization is just a behavior is a far more humane way to understand a spacy 11-year old. Giving a 6th grader an "F" on his notebook for disorganization strikes me as bad for the 6th grader.

Little did I know that middle schools crop up in research on the development of depression in adolescence as a contributing factor:

…evidence has accumulated to suggest that, in addition to the family influences just described, schools and neighborhoods contribute to patterns of academic and psychological adjustment, especially during the transition from elementary to middle schools (National Research Council, 1993). Therefore, the school environment is likely to be implicated in the development of depression. This view is corroborated, at least partially, by the fact that certain forms of psychological distress, including depressive symptoms, increase during the middleschool years. Perceptions of being academically competent and receiving good grades have been linked with a reduced risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties, whereas low perceived academic competence is related to depressive symptoms in children (Blechman, McEnroe, Carella, & Audette, 1986; Cole, 1991). Moreover, adolescents who do not feel a connection with school may be more likely to engage in antisocial activities and substance abuse in efforts to boost their self-esteem and sense of belonging (Rosenberg, Schooler, & Schoenbach, 1989). In general, it has become increasingly clear that problems of academic alienation, poor school performance, and minor delinquency that become more prominent in early adolescence are linked to negative mental health problems such as depression that are manifested later in adolescence (Eccles, Lord, & Roeser, 1996). Such negative outcomes have been related to diminished support for the development of competence, for feelings of belongingness, and for autonomy promotion characteristic of elementary school, but not of middle-school, environments (Higgins & Parsons, 1983). Evidence such as this suggests that the failure of the school environment to facilitate development as children progress into middle schools may contribute to motivational and mental health problems. Inappropriate school environments during early adolescence can place many young people at risk for the negative trajectories that some lives take, including alienation from prosocial activities and peers, depression, and involvement in antisocial pursuits. Importantly, positive adjustment to school, including academic engagement and achievement, is likely to serve as a protective factor against negative mental health outcomes (Eccles et al., 1996).

source:
The Development of Depression in Children and Adolescents
Dante Cicchetti and Sheree L. Toth
February 1998
American Psychologist
Vol. 53, No. 2, 221-241

Blechman, E.A., McEnroe, M.J., Carella, E.T., & Audette, D.P. (1986). Childhood competence and depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95, 223-227.

Eccles, J. S., Lord, S., & Roeser, R.W. (1996). Round holes, square pegs, rocky roads, and sore feet: A discussion of stage-environment fit theory applied to families and school. In D. Cicchetti & S. L. Toth (Eds.), Rochester Symposium on Developmental Psychopathology: Volume 7. Adolescence: Opportunities and challenges (pp. 47-92). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Higgins, E. T., & Parsons, J. E. (1983). Social cognition and the social life of the child: Stages as subculture. In E. T. Higgins, D. W. Ruble, & W, W. Hartup (Eds.), Social cognition and social behavior: Developmental issues (pp. 15-62). New York: Cambridge University Press.

National Research Council. (1993). Losing generations: Adolescents in high-risk settings. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Rosenberg, M., Schooler, C., & Schoenbach, C. (1989). Self-esteem and adolescent problems: Modeling reciprocal effects. American Sociological Review, 54, 1004-1018.

I have more than once seen the "transition" to middle school cited as a source of profound stress in the lives of young adolescents. Typically researchers and authors seem simply to assume that "transition" from one school to another per se is the source of difficulty.

I am coming to think that the middle school model in and of itself, its core assumptions, is bad for children -- bad, or at least not good. When you assume that other people's children universally require substantial character education, how reinforcing can you be?

Steve on teachers, homework, and Extra Help

"I check to make sure they made the effort and tried the assignment while they check their answers, and we go over every single problem that is asked."

Do you collect the homework? You should. I did. I didn't grade each problem, but I saw what the issues were myself on a daily basis and I gave each homework a check/plus/minus effort grade. If you don't collect the homework and grade it somehow, then students don't have any incentive to do it in the first place. When I went over problems in class, I didn't have to rely on students to ask questions. Few do.


"How can you assume that it's a "teacher problem" when something isn't understood in class?"

How can you, the professional, assume that it isn't when you rely on the kids to tell you if there is a problem. You see and grade the tests. What do you do if students have major issues? By the time you get to a test, it's really difficult to go back and fix things. Perhaps eliminating homework and giving weekly quizzes would work better. Something other than monthly tests needs to push the students and inform the teacher about what is going on.

High school kids should take more responsibility, but you can't use that as a prerequisite for a good education. You have to try to structure things to prevent failure, not just leave it up to the kids.

Many students would NEVER come to my office hours. I never threw that back at them. I tried to think of ways to make it unnecessary for them to need extra help. Students hate going for extra help. It's a last resort. By then, the problem is really bad. A large use of extra help by many students implies that there is something fundamental going wrong, and it can't be blamed on the students.

Steve is on a roll today.

Having just finished Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog - a life-altering book - I've been thinking about this issue here at home.

We were reaching - had reached - the point at which I was using "aversives" to compel C. to get things done.

Of course I learned years ago, from behaviorists who taught us techniques for raising autistic kids, that aversives aren't very effective. Pryor goes further. Pryor argues, rightly I believe, that negatives have negative side effects.

A "negative reinforcer," by the way, increases the likelihood that a particular behavior will be repeated in the future. That's why it's called a "reinforcer," and that's what makes it different from a punishment. A punishment doesn't increase the likelihood of the punished behavior occurring in the future.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), punishers also don't particularly decrease the likelihood of the behavior occurring again. Behaviorists universally seem to think that punishing bad behavior just is not an effective means of getting people to straighten up and fly right.

In theory, a negative reinforcer should be no different from a positive reinforcer; in both cases the behavior being reinforced is likely to be repeated. Thus doing your math homework to get a good grade should be no different from doing your math homework to avoid getting a bad grade.

But in reality, negative reinforcement has side effects. This is Pryor's view; I don't think this is a consensus view in the field. Pryor is a researcher and a trainer. Her many years of animal training have made her an advocate of the exclusive use of positive reinforcement.

More on side effects later.

Everything Steve has said in his comments thus far could have been written by Pryor. I think.

Here at home, I've been working on increasing positive reinforcement while reducing negative reinforcement and punishment.

Pryor is right: positives work far better than negatives.

Why is it so much more difficult to use them, I wonder?

book club - Don't Shoot the Dog - money for grades

I've finished Don't Shoot the Dog - amazing.

Life-altering.

And, best of all: will get a 13-year old to do math with his mother!

Have been trying to steal time to write posts about the book, and then for some reason was inspired to compose what should have been a first post here as a Comment on Ken's blog instead.

subject: "extinguishing" a behavior you don't like by putting the behavior on cue.

academic motivation

Good observations and resources from Liz & palisdesk in the comments thread.

I'm thinking about motivation this year for a couple of reasons. The first has to do with my determination to:

a) commit every last word of Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog to memory

and

b) apply it

and

c) do same with David L. Watson's Self-Directed Behavior.

Looks like I'll also have to spend time slogging through the 2nd edition of John Cooper's Applied Behavior Analysis thanks to last week's Barnes and Noble Promotional Gift Card snafu.^*

My second reason has to do with the question: how does one convince a teenager that staying in school is a good idea?

I don't know the answer to that. I don't even know where to begin.

............................

^* sauve qui peut alert: B&N Promotional Gift Cards do not cover textbooks, & customer service reps are apparently unable to cancel as yet unplaced orders for textbooks. Promotional Christmas Gift Cards are a risky proposition, I conclude. On the other hand, my efforts to spend this season's $50 Garnet Hill Promotional Gift Card without purchasing a $100-item at full price sans Promotional Discount seem to have met with success. So that's something.

a heroine I didn't know I had

Marian Breland Bailey: many lives

Many of you here will recall Marian as the alert, white-haired lady who was a fixture in the audience of SQAB talks. She was still at it last year, sitting near the front and listening intently to the speaker, with none of the zoning out or dozing off that characterizes many academics over 50. At the end of a talk, she frequently raised her hand, and proceeded to ask a question or share a bit of information. The questions were always relevant, never creampuffs, and the information mostly “dead on,” obviously drawn from a lifetime of working with animals. If the speaker was fortunate, she offered both questions and information.

I experienced Marian’s audience input first hand at a talk about misbehavior in the late 1970s. After reviewing examples (most drawn from the American Psychologist article by Marian and Keller Breland), I suggested that misbehavior consisted of preorganized species-typical foraging responses triggered by a cue with niche-related characteristics that predicted a delayed reward. Ten minutes from the end of the talk, I was supporting this view by pointing out that misbehavior typically involved appetitive rather than consummatory responses when, suddenly, Marian stood up and politely took charge. “I’m Marian Breland Bailey,” she said. “I like what you are saying, but we (she gestured toward Bob Bailey seated beside her) have to go to another talk. I want you to know, though, that consummatory responses show misbehavior. Animals often eat props paired with food. I’ve seen a dolphin swallow an inner tube, and turkeys eat the quarters we trained them to deposit. After they died you could find the coins ground smooth in their gizzards.” With that, she and Bob exited, leaving me to finish the talk on my own.

Later that day at a social hour, Marian introduced me to Bob, and suggested that I look at the book on Animal Behavior she and Keller had written in the early 1960s. I checked it out when I got home, and like everything else Marian was involved with, the book proved to be both groundbreaking and informative. I’d like to share two quotes from it here, saving a few others for later.

The first is a Konrad Lorenz like comment on the behavior of ducks and chickens, expressed in plain-spoken American:

Young ducks and chickens ... do not care to be handled, and will get away if they can. In their society, friends are not grabbers. (Animal Behavior, p. 64)

The second is a warning about the pitfalls of focusing on methodology:

The psychologist who thinks that psychology has reached the end point of its development and that all there is left now is to work out the details with the endless proliferation of experiments under different schedules of reinforcement, schedules of deprivation, and the like, will miss the diversity and richness of animal and human behavior. (Animal Behavior, p. 116)

[snip]

Marian Kruse, as she was known in 1938, began her career in behavior working with B.F. Skinner shortly after he joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota.

[snip]

In his experimental work at Harvard, Dr. Skinner focused on constructing and tuning apparatus and procedures to facilitate the emergence and control of the operant lever press. He continued this apparatus-based approach at Minnesota, but, at the same time, he began to attend to developing various operants in less constrained circumstances. One resultant change was an emerging recognition of the possibilities of shaping—the rewarding of successively closer approximations to a target operant. The concept of shaping was the topic of a photographic essay in Life magazine... In the apartment of a friend, Skinner demonstrated the shaping of an operant by rewarding the dog accompanying the photographer for successively higher leaps against a wall. The wall was marked with horizontal lines at increasing heights to make the changing response criteria clear. Given successively more challenging heights to obtain food, the dog rapidly went from not jumping at all to leaping high against the wall.

The emphasis on shaping was accompanied by a second development, the use of an easily controlled secondary reinforcing signal to reward each successive approximation to the operant. A secondary reinforcer (eventually often a hand-held “clicker”) was established by pairing it with food; then it was used to shape the animal’s behavior by presenting it after an appropriate response. The clicker had advantages over presenting a food hopper in that it was portable (no electrical power or relay racks needed), and it could be applied without interrupting responding by the delivery of food.

[snip]

Marian and Keller Breland soon saw that the implementation of shaping using bridging (as they called the use of clickers) could be used to train animals for many purposes, including commercial ones. In 1943, against the advice of many friends and colleagues (including Dr. Skinner who argued reasonably that they should stay in school and finish their degrees) they left Skinner’s lab for a small farm in Mound, Minnesota. Founding a two-person company called ABE, they began to explore the possibilities of shaping and bridging using a variety of rewards and species. Not only were they successful at developing new behavior, they set a precedent for their enterprise by investing in research before trying to sell a product. Their favorite species, because of availability, tractability, and potential immediate payoff; was chickens, but they were never shy about trying other animals, such as sheep, goats, cattle, horses, geese, swans, rabbits, ducks, etc., over 140 species in all.

Like most beginning business, the critical goal of ABE was to put food on the table; so after being satisfied with the success of their techniques, Keller began selling corporations the idea of using trained animals in advertisements, especially in the form of a traveling animal show advertising a company’s products. By 1951 they had written a general training manual for working with animals, formed multiple touring shows, officially launched the area of Applied Animal Psychology in an article in the American Psychologist, and moved to larger and warmer quarters in Hot Springs Arkansas.

Regrettably, Keller died in 1965, but ABE continued to prosper under Marian’s direction, accumulating a group of talented people interested in commercial applications, ranging from Grant Evans to Kent Burgess and Robert Bailey, eventually a staff of 43. Marian and Bob Bailey consolidated the enterprise by marrying in 1976. ABE branched out to television commercials in 1954 and began providing small theme parks with prepackaged animal shows. For example, they had a stable of raccoons that played basketball and pianos, and hunted for eggs or crawfish. They also influenced the development of large-scale popular shows using subjects from marine mammals to parrots, and spent considerable time doing government funded research on potential applications of behavioral control. They advised public figures and groups ranging from Marlon Perkins to Walt Disney. Though persistence was their trademark, they finally gave up trying to encourage zoos to use training techniques to facilitate husbandry in captive animals. Their ideas in this case were nearly half a century too early.

[snip]

Marian integrated teaching with family life in Hot Springs Arkansas, serving as a Girl Scout Leader for 9 years and President of the local PTA. She gave her time to many organizations and committees concerned with mental retardation and autism. In the early 1960s Marian wrote one of the earliest manuals instructing ward attendants how to teach the developmentally disabled. She continued as president of ABE and lead scientist on many government projects, and, as though that weren’t enough, she returned to graduate school, earning her Ph.D. in 1978. She soon began teaching at Henderson State College, rising to full professor before retiring at the age of 78, some 20 years later. In 1996 Marian began a new teaching career with Bob Bailey offering small classes in animal training to professional trainers. They got their show on the road, pulling a trailer loaded with equipment and chickens across large portions of the United States and into Canada. the word out by taking their show on the road, pulling a trailer loaded with equipment and chickens across large portions of the United States and into Canada.

[snip]


Marian Breland Bailey was a wonderful combination of vision, perseverance, caring, independence, innovation, and brains; a leading scientist and practitioner, a mother, trainer, teacher, administrator, and a community and business leader. I see her philosophical stance as a positive and pragmatic iconoclast. She saw what was missing and proceeded to do something about it. She was not deterred by much of anything, except the possibility that people might give her more credit than she felt she deserved.

In speaking of her work with Keller Breland, she mentioned:

I would ... like to emphasize that Mr. Breland was always the principal author; his were the ideas, the creative spark, and the bulk of the substantive portion of the writing. I have been the journalist, organizer, rewrite editor, and author of narration and expository prose. Another way of putting it might be to say that he was the architect of the dreams and I the engineer. (Animal Behavior, p. ix)

She was one of the pioneers and until two months ago I had never heard of her.

I'm filing this under "Book Club."


The Misbehavior of Organisms
Marian Breland Bailey: many lives (pdf file)
book club
a heroine I didn't know I had

book club

We may need to form a book club for interested folks. I say this selfishly because I need people to help me brainstorm my way through Karen Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog, especially now that I'm hyper-aware of how difficult it is to generalize newly-acquired knowledge.

Pryor's book is brilliant. Reading it I see that I've been barking up the wrong tree thinking cognitive science has the answers. (barking?) Cognitive science does have answers; it's a valuable and riveting field. But when it comes to education the behaviorists are way out in front. Direct Instruction, Precision Teaching, Don't Shoot the Dog -- they're so far out in front they're disappeared from view.

No wonder their work is no longer taught in ed schools. (scroll down)


life-altering factoid number 1

Chickens procrastinate.

Using either fixed or variable schedules, extremely long sequences of behavior can be trained. A baby chick can be induced to peck a button a hundred times or more for each grain of corn. For humans there are many examples of delayed gratification. One psychologist jokes that the longest schedule of unreinforced behavior in human existence is graduate school. [ed.: followed closely by middle school]

[snip]

Another phenomenon occurs on very long schedules: slow starts. The chick pecks away at a steady rate once it gets started, because each peck brings it nearer to reinforcement, but researchers have noted that a chick tends to "put off" starting for longer periods as the schedule of reinforcement gets longer.

This is sometimes called delayed start of long-duration behavior, and it's a very familiar aspect of human life. On any long task, from doing the income taxes to cleaning out the garage, one can think of endless reasons for not starting now. Writing, even sometimes just the writing of a letter, is a long-duration behavior. Once it gets started, things usually roll along fairly well, but, oh! it's so hard to make oneself sit down and begin, James Thurber found it so difficult to start an article that he sometimes fooled his wife (who was understandably anxious for him to write articles since that was how the rent got paid) by lying on a couch in his study all morning reading a book in one hand while tapping the typewriter keys at random with the other.

Don't Shoot the Dog, Revised Edition, p. 25

palisdesk on change in ed school curriculum
The Misbehavior of Organisms
Marian Breland Bailey: many lives (pdf file)
book club
a heroine I didn't know I had