We principals are not the invincible sex gods the teen magazines would have you believe

I love my psychology class. We're studying learning right now, conditioning and the like. It is very awesome. I am looking forward to christmas break so I can train my brother. Previous flaws in my attempts to subject the boy to my will of cold drinks and discarded candy wrappers are overt, and will be easily corrected. I can't help but laugh at all the various conditioning experiments we subjected misfortunate students to in that damned hall and storage room. Sam's idea to create a supersoldier out of tristian could not have come to fruition, although he did become increasingly aggressive and fearful, as a strict diet of negative stimulii induce. We really should have had some girl (a positive reinforcement in itself) working with us that could "remove" the taser if he met certain criteria. Eventually we'd remove the girl from the equation before he would become dependent on her for protection and simply allow his satisfying of the initial demand to appease us. Other details like rewarding him for not avoiding holcomb as a negative stimulus would also have needed to be dealt with, we did to some part, with the handoffs of it so often, but not nearly enough. The situation as a whole would have just been so much better if we just could have rigged the drinking fountain to exhibit a mild electric shock when used like we had originally concieved. Alas, the alternative was still fun. I think I did a decent job with the squirt bottle to discourage talking, to some extent. While the ethics of it are certainly questionable, for the most part it worked, that is, we had productive sectionals. My plan to increase its negative affect was also in the right fashion, although some parts of it, such as different types of water, would not be effective unless they didn't enjoy the taste of saltwater, which most people don't. I did have limited positive reinforcement (giving candy) as well in addition to occasional negative reinforcement (not spraying them or letting them spray others). I don't think I ever applied much negative punishment, and am not sure exactly what I would have withheld if I had done so, although many possibilities were there had I thought to try. I think a major failure in it was my lack of consistancy, especially with positive reinforcement, and my occasional slack in maintaining a strict rehersal standard for talking and such. Also that they began to equate the squirtbottle into the conditioned stimulus as much as the talking, perhaps more, so in areas such as marching where I did not have the squirt bottle, they soon learned that they could talk all they wanted. Which they did. I did try to correct that last thing, but ultimately abandoned the project because a wearable supersoaker for positive punishment during marching band just isn't a simple procedure, as cool as it may have been. Again, some ethical issues as well. I won't go into the time Will was trained to fear clapping or his own name, as I wasn't ever a large part of that and cannot be sure of its administration or products. From what I'd seen, it worked though. A similar experiment which was shut down involved Chuck, this was mainly because of lack of interest and participation. To my credit, positive reinforcement through continual encouragement eventually made Danny into the sex-fiend that he became. I will probably never understand all the forces at work there, but will lay claim to a majority of them in the area (other influences in the area were primarily physiological and social coming from Britany and I can think of no discouraging stimulii regarding the matter until after the learning had been established [id est breaking up with britany]) and the successful results. This has been a rather large dissertation which was probably very uninteresting, but if you ate some enjoyable candy after each post you read, you'd eventually like them more. I encourage that with a strong "atta boy".