Behaviorism Video

I have never heard behaviorism explained in this way and I really liked the way he explained because it makes sense.  He compares behavioral psychologist to dog trainers.   Over the years I have trained several dogs and helped people trained dogs but I would never have looked at myself in that way.  I completely agree with him when he says children are different than animals.  However, just as a dog trainer tries to get certain behaviors out of dogs (no matter what type of dog), the behavioral psychologist tries to get certain behaviors out of children (no matter race, sex, etc).  Food for thought.

Chapter 15 The Will

In the fifteenth talk James describes will in a broader and in a narrower sense.  He says the broader sense is designated to our entire capacity for impulsive and active life, which includes our instinctive reactions and those forms of behaviors that have become secondarily automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent repetition.  He says “in the narrower sense, acts of will are such acts only as cannot be inattentively performed.” (p.87)  He also talks about how much of what we do is due to habit.

“It is clear that in general we ought, whenever we can, to employ the method of inhibition by substitution.” (p. 94)  He says that inhibition by substitution is “the inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the idea which it inhibits, and the latter quickly vanishes from the field.”  (p. 94) The reason I like this passage is I agree, as long as we don’t loss the ability to compensate for change.  Although, I sometime wonder about some of the things that have become such routine for me.  Like the other day I was driving to school and once I sat down in my class I couldn’t even remember driving to class.  Now I knew I drove to class but I was so zoned out thinking about other things in my life I just could remember the details about the drive.

How much free will do we really have?

Chapter 14 Apperception

In the fourteenth talk James discusses apperception, which he says is simply nothing more than the act of taking a thing into the mind.  He talks about how the process of apperception is the association of ideas.  He states, “the product is a sort of fusion of the new with the old, in which it is often impossible to distinguish the share of the two factors.” (p. 78)

“Few men ever do acquaint themselves with the principles of a new science after even twenty-five.” (p. 80)  This passage stood out to me because I don’t know if that is true of today.  I understand what he is saying and it makes sense but he was giving these talks in a completely different time.  Back then most people had a job that they did and never did anything else.  But, today people change jobs/careers more often, which is causing them to learn something completely different at an age well past what he says.  But if what he says is true, what do we do when we are older than twenty-five having to learn principles of a new science?

Chapter 13 The Acquisition of Ideas

In the thirteenth talk James discusses the different stages in life when ideas are acquired.   He also talks about how experiences are important in the development of ideas.

The passage that I liked the most out of this talk was “Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience of which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be ‘wasting’ a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.” (p. 73)  I love this because it is so true.  I had several experiences in school that have stuck with me forever and I sure do wish I had more.  The majority of they were related to what we were learning academically.  However, there were other experiences, not related to the course work, but were just as profound.  The one that stands out the most was when I was a freshman in high school.  No one knew what my teacher was doing but she did.  She taught us how to manage several projects at one time and to get them done by the deadline.  It was an English class and she taught all of us time management. 

He talks about how you need to do these activities in the proper place.  He states that, “it is not until adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequence.”  Well, how do we know when a child is ready and able to take in more abstract experiences?  Every child is different from one another.  

Chapter 12 Memory

In the twelfth talk James discusses how memory is more than just a faculty.  He also talks about how it is the association of ideas.  He also says that teachers shouldn’t measure gains of their students by their proficiency in directly reproducing in a recitation or an examination.

“Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal.  But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.  On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.  This is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of continuous application.” (p. 64)  I really enjoyed the passage from James talk because I can relate.  I had a lot of wonderful teachers that I learned a lot from but I was not taught early on how to get information to stay in my memory.  I remember in elementary school everything was repeated more often in class but as I got older things were not repeated as much.  The teachers were required to get through more material but I was not taught how to keep the information in my memory.  Many times I would cram for a test but I was unable to retain a lot of the information.  I am not sure but what age would be a good age to show the students how to study?  Do the teachers even know how to study themselves?  I know my brother would never have to study because he had the ability to remember pretty much anything that he was shown.  What do you do when you have students with that ability?  Or teachers that had that ability so the don’t know how to study?

Chapter 11 Attention

In the eleventh talk James discusses how interest and attention are connected to one another.  He also talks about passive attention or spontaneous attention and voluntary attention or deliberate attention.

In this talk the passage that stood out to me was, “But, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, while others simply cannot.  And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper springs of human personality to conduct the task.”  (p. 52) You can see this in the classroom for sure but you can see it everywhere.  It happens in church, when someone is giving a speech, when someone is telling a story, etc.  I still believe like I said before that people can be taught (not all) how to get the audiences attention. 

Like I had mentioned earlier my brother had ADHD which was part of the reason he had so much trouble in school.  What took the normal student a week to learn it took him only a day so a lot of the time he was bored.  How can teachers keep the attention of the students that understand it but are bored because they don’t need to go over the material as much as the others? 

Chapter 10 Interest

In the tenth talk James talks about there are native tendencies of interest.  He talks about how greater learning occurs when the audience is interested.  He also talks about how it is possible to make something uninteresting interesting. 


The passage “Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.  The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing.” (p. 47) is great because it is so true.  When working with Dr. Henry on her Skill Up Kentucky project I saw this first hand.  It was a GED program, a little different, that had older students.  There was a gentle in this program that did not see the point in math but he loved construction.  The teacher after learning this took the math they were learning and related it to construction.  The student said to me “ I have never in my life been excited about math but I now can’t wait to go to math class.  It makes so much sense and it is so easy now.”  Now this was an extremely small class of 10 students so the teacher was able to do this for every student.  But, how can teachers with larger classrooms do the same type of thing for their students?  Or I think we should find some way to lower the number of students in a teachers classroom.