Marc Gold is a legend in the support of people with mental retardation. He demonstrated that most people's judgment about the ability of a person with mental retardation is based on a relationship to traditional instructional techniques -- "If a person cannot learn successfully by sitting still in a classroom, it must mean he or she cannot learn at all." Gold knew different and demonstrated that experiental techniques faciliated successful learning in people of all IQ's, not just those with mental retardation. Many of his techniques bear a strong resemblance to the modeling process outlined in WITW but with no explicit instructions to the modeler. Gold set up an environment that would lead people through the modeling process while appearing to be "just messing around." As a result, the person seemed to magically learn a skill supposedly beyond his or her ability. Marc was also a bit of a maverick, often showing up at prestigous keynotes with his long pony tail, wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and carrying a Scooby Doo lunch box. He would ask, "What kind of speech do you expect from me given the way I look?" Marc described what he called a "competency / deviance tradeoff" meaning the more competency you have in a specific context, the more deviance people will tolerate. His point was that helping people with mental retardation to learn skills of value to general society and dressing at an age appropriate level were two important ways to demonstrate competency that would allow these people to participate more fully in general society despite their occassional deviant behaviors. Most people tend to tolerate extreme deviance in the behavior of geniuses (although the term "deviance" is usually reframed as "eccentricity"). When such a genius acheives a guru states, it is amazing how many disciples will model the deviance versus the competency and then wonder why that same deviance is not tolerated in the same way. This is the danger of wanting to be just like (insert genius here) by duplicating the genius's behavior rather than desiring to duplicate the genius's results. Thoughts? - Ulic