Can a child of 7 really be as evil as Dotty Cotton?
I agree with Buddha about Jamie. I think that this has to do with conditioning. Just as dogs were conditioned in Pavlov’s psychological experiment to think that they would get food when the bell was rang and would start to salivate, a child can be conditioned. I taught children for a brief time and they were easy to condition but obviously in a nicer way! They would respond to “One, two, three…Quiet!” and to my body language. Upon saying “Quiet!”, I would stretch my arms out as if I had had enough of the noise and to show them that we had to get on with learning. They would go quiet and pay attention and only speak when they were speaking about the subject that I was teaching. Nick Cotton brought her up that way or, if she isn’t really his daughter, the environment that she was in affected her that way and she had no good adult role models regardless. When I saw her hesitating when he asked her why she had not set the alarm clock, I wondered if she was having doubts but the last prog
