pavlov's mice

Anne Williams, Eugene Register Guard, June 15, 2009

Bill Deese, a veteran first-grade teacher at Gilham Elementary School, struck gold seven years ago when he held the first mouse circus, inspired by a student teacher’s [NAME?!?!?] more modest, mouse-related classroom project. His students stay busy as bees, and the whole school reaps the benefits.

When it comes to getting through these last days of school, “One of the best ideas I have is you save the best stuff for last,” said Deese, a gentle-mannered native Southerner who is retiring this year. “We go right up to the bell with this.”
Last Thursday, it was the second-graders’ turn to watch the circus, held in the music room and hosted by first-graders in black top hats. Other grades had their chance earlier, and the rest will get theirs this week.

Every year Deese embellishes and expands the circus, which is far more than just a year-end showcase. His students begin preparing for the circus weeks in advance, building mazes to certain specifications using the AppleWorks Draw program, creating charts, reading books and writing stories about mice, holding pre-circus trials and, of course, getting to know and safely handle the 10 tiny performers.

They include Lily, the Climbing Queen, who has been known to ascend a dangling string all the way up to the ceiling; Star, a maze ace; and Wildy, an all-around athlete who, by the students’ careful calculations, eats far more — in quantity and variety — than her competitors.

“I like Lily ’cause she climbs really high, and I like the mouse swimming,” said Cynae Martin, who, like several other of Deese’s students, said she’ll miss first grade once school’s out.
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Hopefully, the name Pavlov rings a bell for you. He's the guy who discovered classical conditioning. Inherently meaningless events such as the sound of a bell or the sight of a white lab coat become meaningful when they become associated with inherently meaningful events such as saliva-gland-stimulating meat powder placed on your tongue by Pavlov or one of his bell-ringing, white-coat-wearing assistants. If you had a crush on someone the first time you heard Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, that song’s always going to remind you of how you felt about that person. Classical conditioning is about linking two external events in the environment.

Pavlov’s 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winning research is so famous that stand-up comic Eddie Izzard did a bit called "Pavlov's Cats."

The Russian physiologist Pavlov’s discovery of classical conditioning (CC) paved the way for American psychologist (Harvard, Minnesota, Indiana) B.F. Skinner’s description of the principles of instrumental conditioning (IC). [It would be disrespectful to every parent, teacher and dog trainer to say that Skinner “discovered” the principles of IC, the way that Pavlov discovered the principles of CC.] When you give your dog a treat every time the dog “shakes” your hand, you are reinforcing the shaking behavior and increasing its chances of occurring in the future. Instrumental conditioning is about linking an animal's behavior to an external event in the environment.

Now we've got Mr. Deese's mice, who are "taught" to climb and swim. The non-consensual laborers who perform in Mr. Deese’s circus aren’t Pavlov’s mice, they are Skinner’s mice. Someone, it is not clear who, trains the mice to climb up a rope and “swim.” The training for swimming might just involve dropping the mice in a bucket of agua and forcing them to swim or drown (Y’all get your Michael Phelpses on now, ya hear?) and the training for climbing might just be to put a chunk of cheddar at the top of the rope. I don’t know because the details of the training of the non-consensual, unpaid (i.e., slave) laborers were not described in the article in the R-G by Anne Williams.

I think it is fair to ask whether it is ethical for Mr. Deese to use n rodents a year for the purpose of creating this circus. Presumably Mr. Deese does not breed and raise the slave laborers in his garage, but rather purchases them from a company that provides laboratory animals to biology and neuroscience and pharmaceutical laboratories all across the county. How much does it cost Gilham Elementary School to purchase these (rather expensive, I’m betting) rodents? Perhaps the money spent to purchase mammalian slaves could be better spent on diversity-enhancing books like “Heather has two mommies” and “Uncle Joey wears fishnets.”

Aside from the financial cost of the rodents, there’s the question of whether they are used in an ethical way. When an educational institution purchases live beings, it needs to ensure that those live being are being used in a humane way and in a way that advances the educational agenda. If a high school math teacher bought a bunch of mice and allowed students to spend all their time making NASCAR tracks for them and racing them and quantifying various aspects of their behavior and pretended that was "math," those of us who live in the subset of Lane County not represented by Commissioners Dwyer and Stewart would be appalled.

Is Deese's circus use ethically justified? The fact that Mr. Deese saves it for the end of the year means it has high entertainment value. But what is the educational value?

It seems to me that if an elementary school is going to purchase laboratory grade animals, there needs to be a scientific component. If an AP Biology teacher wants to buy dead mice and have the kids dissect them, that’s great. If you want to buy live mice and keep them that way, you need to do something scientific with them. You need to have the kids actively train the mice, using principles of Skinnerian instrumental conditioning.

An added benefit of adding a scientific component (behaviorism 00001) and useful life skill (teaching humans to instrumentally condition other mammals) is that the 2-6 grade students could also participate if they wanted to. Children with an aptitude for training or an interest in science might choose to generate more elaborate tricks than climbing for cheddar and swimming for your life. The K-6 science curriculum could be cumulative and evolve into psychology and biology by fourth grade instead of degenerating into NASCAR science which is what it does now.

Last Thursday, it was the second-graders’ turn to watch the circus, held in the music room and hosted by first-graders in black top hats. Other grades had their chance earlier, and the rest will get theirs this week. Julia Siporin’s third-graders will deliver multimedia keynote presentations on endangered animals. Peggy Lilyengren’s fourth-graders will build race cars this week to complete a science unit on motion and design.