After our lesson on operant conditioning I recalled an incident that occurred while I was in the sixth grade. In our class there was a boy, Mason, who had a mental disability. Our teacher had us read the novel Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes as a way to learn about mental disabilities and how society treats people with mental disabilities. The novel is about Charlie Gordon, a man with a very low IQ who works as a janitor in a factory. He is selected to undergo an experimental surgical technique to increase his intelligence. The technique had already been successfully tested on Algernon, a laboratory mouse. The surgery on Charlie is also a success and his IQ triples. Charlie falls in love with his former teacher, Miss Kinnian, but as his intelligence increases, he surpasses her intellectually and they become unable to relate to each other. He also realizes that his co-workers at the factory, whom he thought were his friends, only liked him to be around so that they could make fun of him. As Charlie’s intelligence peaks, Algernon’s suddenly declines and dies shortly afterward. Algernon was buried in a cheese box in Charlie’s backyard. Charlie discovers that his intelligence increase is also only temporary. He starts to experiment to find out the cause of the flaw in the experiment. Just when he finishes his experiments, his intelligence begins to disintegrate, to such an extent that he becomes even less intelligent than he was before the experiment. Charlie is aware of, and pained by, what is happening to him as he loses his knowledge and his ability to read and write. He tries to get his old job as a janitor back, and tries to revert to normal but he cannot stand the pity from his co-workers, landlady, and Ms. Kinnian. Charlie then decides to move to a new place. His last wish is that someone put flowers on Algernon’s grave every day.
Growing up with a disability Mason endured copious amounts of teasing from his peers and was often bullied as well. Whenever our teacher noticed Mason being teased, pitied or being treated unfairly our teacher would have whoever was treating him unfairly go out in the rose garden, cut a flower, bring it back, and stand in front of the entire class to recite the epigraph from the novel which about discouraging people from laughing at those who are “perplexed or weak of vision” while holding the flower and after reciting the epigraph apologise and present Mason with the flower. Upon your first mistreatment of Mason you had to do this task once but at your second or third time you had to do this task twice or three times respectively. Needless to say Mason was barely teased or mistreated by his peers ever again. I now realize that this task was operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which an individual’s behaviour is modified by its antecedents and consequences. The type of operant conditioning my teacher was performing was a positive punishment. A positive punishment occurs when a response is followed by a stimulus, such as the task of getting a flower and reciting the epigraph, resulting in a decrease in mistreating Mason.