Tags for "B.f. Skinner"

Skinner Box to Freedom

Posted on Nov 17, 2009 - 08:44 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve

So, there I stood. In front of my thirty 9th graders, hour after hour, watching them write letters to each other, put their gum under their desks, talk to their neighbors while the assigned worksheet on the parts of speech I just spent the night before diligently creating fell silently to the floor. Think I am being melodramatic? I wish! In one class, I laughed to myself for a solid thirty seconds (a long time in high school time), after I spent three minutes going back and forth with a student as to why throwing wads of paper at a girl he did not like was unacceptable.

"Stop doing that and apologize."

"What? She doesn't care."

"She's not going to tell you she cares, but I do....

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Re-hired and It Feels So Good

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 - 10:16 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve

On January 29th, I received my official letter of termination. Our district has lost more than a million dollars in funding and any new teachers were immediately cut. On February 1st, I received my official letter of re-assignment. This story has a happy beginning.

Title I funding was used to bring me back (me in all my un-tenured glory) as a literacy intervention teacher. I have a class size cap of 10 students and the freedom to build this course from the ground up.

First assignment: I had students watch this video clip:



A video on how to teach a dog to roll over using operant conditioning. Students were utterly confused, wondering what sort of class they were put in, and I...

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