Ogden lindsley biography sample
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B. F. Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, a small railroad town in the hills of Pennsylvania just below Binghamton, New York.
With one younger brother, he grew up in a home environment he described as “warm and stable”.
His father was a rising young lawyer, his mother a housewife. Much of his boyhood was spent building things – for example a cart with steering that worked backwards (by mistake) and a perpetual motion machine (the latter did not work). Other ventures were more successful. He and a friend built a cabin in the woods. For a door to door business selling elderberries, he designed a flotation system to separate ripe from green berries. When working in a shoe store during his high school years, he made a contraption to distribute the “green dust” that helped the broom pick up dirt.
In high school, Skinner took an English class taught by Miss Graves to whom he was later to dedicate his book, The Technology of Teaching. Based on a remark by his father, he blurted out in class one day that Shakespeare had not written As You Like It, but rather Frances Bacon. When his teacher told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, he went to the library and read quite a bit of Bacon’s works. Bacon’s
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