Newsletter
Volume 28 | 2005 | Number 1
Selections from the Standard Celeration Listserve’s Love to Og
…While ABA is struggling to spread and displace less effective analyses, Og comes along and builds on Fred Skinner’s work. Og gives us celeration visualized on the standard celeration chart, which effectively lines up cumulative record dots in a way that makes for simple quick easy and accurate analysis and prediction. [(It) takes longer to type these words than it takes to look at a Chart and know if you need to make a change...and you don’t need these words at all.]
So Og’s tool gives us the power to fulfill the possibilities inherent in the cumulative record, and the levels of analysis needed to figure out what’s happening, and then to build way beyond it.
Og also gives us “the child is always right” and fights a cult of personality. Keep it to the real. So Chart newbie’s and their Charts are valued and we all can see it and grow on what’s real….
Thanks Og. Your work is firmly rooted.
Chuck Merbitz
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Ogden and Nancy,
… Seedmaker you are, and brilliant is your color. Those of us who have navigated parts of our lives with that funniest of blue charts are better for it. We are stronger, more sure of ourselves, more confident that our decisions will be either good ones or ones that need to be changed. You have given ordinary people like myself a tool that has helped us see the world differently….
Sue Casson
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Dear Og and Nancy,
… there are many lessons we’ve learned from you. One of the most significant that I learned, and which I practice, is that positive and negative emotions are independent of each other. Everything’s independent! And, I’ve internalized that … That lesson, and PRACTICED MUSIC REAPS FUN CG, not to mention stop SLOBS, PATUM, and also do TBRO, BFSKINNER, SAFMEDS, COLAB, and P-AE-MC-A-SE = D-S-R-K-C, PT and SCC summarized in acronyms, are all valuable lessons. As is “Accentuate the positive,” and “say reward, relief, punish and penalty,” “try, try again,” and of course, “the child knows best.”
… At all the ABA Chart Shares…, Og Lindsley would, like everyone else, sign in. Under the column of “Chart Parent,” Og would write Fred Skinner. That always warmed my heart, because we were behavior analysts and B. F. Skinner got the whole science rolling with his selection of FREQUENCY as a universal measure.
…So, at the chart shares, Skinner’s name would be up there, proudly next to Og’s–kind of as a reminder….
…What Og wants from us is to make sure that frequency, celeration, fluency and agility, and the Standard Celeration Chart continue on into the future. Do right by Og. Doing right by Og will always mean doing right for your students, your learners, your children, and yourself.
As ever, for ever, your friend,
John W. Eshleman
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Dearest Og and Nancy,
My tears are flowing and my heart is breaking as I write this....
I started out in Precision Teaching with a broken heart, as I desperately searched for a way to help my son (diagnosed with autism) learn to speak, when I met Og at the ABA conference in 1998. I attended Og’s Standard Celeration Charting workshop, and immediately ran back to my hotel room to rechart my stretch-to-fit poster data on the blue Standard Daily Celeration Chart. I have never looked back, and my heart mended - and grew - as Julian’s learning soared. Through your legacy of Standard Charting, my life changed, and I have been able to change the lives of 75 children, and their families….
Og, I had expected to hand my doctoral dissertation to you for examination in the next month, but it appears that the gods are playing rugby [Oz football] with our plans…. I have been standing on your shoulders for the past six years, and my love for you, both as a human being and as a scientist, is immeasurable. I will be forever humble in claiming you as my Chart Parent, and my friend.
I love you Og.
Giordana Hrga
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Dear Og and Nancy
You know you wrought the greatest changes in my career and life, beginning in 1969 when Annie Duncan introduced me to the Chart. Since then the Chart has been my Excalibur, and you were the timely mentor who steered me to Gattegno, Spaulding, and to starting The Learning Incentive, which spawned Ben Bronz Academy.
Your inventions and insights made possible the success of so many children from Spaulding and the Academy, who took charge of their own learning after examining their charts and confidently reporting “Do you see those rising dots and falling learning opportunities? That is my progress, and I am proud of it!”
And you continue to be a model….
And yes, we will try to keep Excalibur shiny!
Shalom, Chaver
Ian Spence
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Today, tens of thousands of children were learning to read with Headsprout. It is clear that without Og this would not have been the case. His influence is felt throughout the program, including the “behind the scenes” use of customized celeration aims derived for each learner based on their individual performance. Soon, vast numbers of Chinese and South African children will be directly experiencing instruction incorporating key concepts from Og’s work. …. I am quite fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time to be another conduit (among many) for Og’s ideas and discoveries.
Many years ago I attended one of Og’s famous high-energy presentations. I was drawn to it because I had been using the “chart” for some time, and I had read Og’s earlier operant laboratory and applied work. At that time I was reading Nat Schoenfeld’s t-tau stimulus schedules work. Schoenfeld maintained that behavior should be viewed as a stream, and that stimuli inserted into the stream resulted in the stream altering in predictable ways as a function of the insertion and the rules for insertion. Seeing Og’s presentation, it became clear to me that Schoenfeld was essentially correct, but that Og had a way of making this clear, and by adding a third great insight (from Is Goldiamond), that the stream could be divided into concurrent or alternative streams whose properties were defined by their relation to the environment as MEASURED by the investigator, I had one of those personal epiphanies. The behavior stream was best measured by changing frequencies of coalescing sub-streams as compared to alternative sub-streams as a function of the stimuli inserted in the whole stream. The discreetness of behavior was an illusion based on the descriptive requirements of our language and how we choose the measurement criteria. We lose the flowing nature of behavior when we take snapshots of bounded sections of the behavior streams (e.g., we do not typically include reaching for the bar when we describe a bar press). We tend to use our stimulus insertions to bracket the behavior stream sample (between the occasion and the consequence). It was clear that the problems of measurement of behavior as a stream and as “units” within the stream presented great problems. It was also clear that the only way to approximate the changes in the flow of the various sub-streams that comprise the full behavior stream, was in terms of frequencies (of bracketed units) specified in relation to inserted stimuli.
I remember about half way through Og’s talk of having the realization of the power of thinking of behavior in terms of alternative streams of changing frequencies (and amplitudes) coalesced around inserted stimuli. One did not need to worry about private events, memory, thinking, complexity, etc.––these were simply metaphors to communicate the effects of coalescing alternative stream frequencies in the continuous stream of behavior. And that the communication itself could be so represented. The selection of complexity from a relatively simple “flow” was now easier for me to understand. Right or wrong, my view has changed little since this Og–induced “epiphany.”
In recent years it has also become clear to me that our emotions are reflections of the relation of the streams to their environment in terms of changing frequencies imposed by certain requirements (contingencies). Brain function and fMRI data become much easier to understand within this context as well...
I once heard some one say that Og represented both the science and the heart of operant psychology. I remember thinking that this was almost right. Og showed that bringing frequency to the people revealed not only his heart, but the heart that resides in the science of behavior as well.
Joe Layng
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…Og-- how did this man develop such an unlikely and yet fantastic group of high achievers? So many different backgrounds, yet all captured by, and committed to, the same goals. This was truly an exceptional man to have worked out such a vision and then worked, and worked, and worked to get so many of us to follow and then move out on our own to make the challenge a reality….
It still seems almost impossible to me that a measurement technology could have bound such a diverse group of individuals together so tightly. I can’t think of any other group of engineers, or measurers, that is anything like ours-- maybe the NASA engineers….
… I just feel that I owe you so much Og.
Bill Wolking
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… Og, … here’s what you … (are that) comes to mind:
Pure intellectual energy dancing through a forest
of overhead projectors Schmaltzy showman turning on the Moody Blues
Scholarly, unwavering custodian of the logical
foundations of a science of behavior Inventor of the Standard Behavior Chart - which
could have, and still might, go down in history
as the psychological equivalent of Cartesian
Coordinates - a standard system for measuring
behavior change.
Elegant creator of practical language:
S-R-K-C
Pinpoint, count, chart and change - and try, try again
Fair pair
The dead man’s test
And, of course, celeration
Your genius dwells in the intellectual precision of those deceptively simple concepts.
With these tools one can do anything.
…Anybody can do it, Og. You gave the world a wonderful set of tools, and the delight of using them and seeing how well they worked will always stay in my heart….
Wells Hively
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The following websites contain information regarding Ogden R. Lindsley, the Standard Celeration Society, and Precision Teaching and include links for even more information including learning centers, academies, and home and cyber schooling: