The only child
Doesn’t always mean more attention from grown-ups.
Sometimes it means
Waking up mom when you need a diaper change
And putting blankies in fish tanks
And records, too
And my bottle.
A little girl
A little conversant
You’d never know she
Doesn’t wear big girl pants
A little girl
With faultless elocution
Who learns to read
To escape reality
Look! Very little time has passed and yet still MORE life lessons.
I must be in the student phase of life once again. It happens at least once a year for me, but lately I have had far more student experiences than teacher experiences. No worries, though, I know for certain that with every phase in my life comes the gradual movement to the next phase. That’s just how this life works.
Humans have this amazing ability to learn. What this means is that based on experiential circumstances, we discover with time and repetition, certain outcomes are brought about. Operant conditioning is what we call this method of learning. It was originally hypothesized and tested (a experiment later described as ‘Pavlov’s Dogs’) by a psychologist Ivan Pavlov, and further perfected by a psychologist BF Skinner. So, this whole conditioned response idea really isn’t a new idea, and in fact, psychologists have been working on understanding it for more than a century.
