Charlie Gordon's Flowers For Algernon

What are you worth? What measures your value? Apparently, some people believe that IQ is a major factor in that. Three people obviously disagree. In “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, “This American Life: A Better Mousetrap” by Ira Glass, and “The Intelligence Quotient is a Fractured Mirror” by hbryu, the common theme is don’t treat people based on their IQ. This theme is prominently displayed time and again throughout “Flowers for Algernon.” In this short story, the protagonist, Charlie Gordon, is a mentally challenged man with an IQ of only 68, which is in the bottom two percent of the population. DELETED TEXT HERE At first, everyone took advantage of Charlie and even coined the term “pull a Charlie Gordon” to describe people who mess
In this transcript, a mother named Kristy tells us about how she dealt with her son Tin’s having Mosaic Down Syndrome. At first she told Tim’s Kindergarten teacher, but she started to treat Tim differently. She would allow Tim to do whatever he wanted to do, just to appease him. However, Kristy didn’t want that. She wanted Tim to have a regular education, just like everybody else. So, from then on, Kristy decided not to tell Tim’s teachers about Tim’s condition. She didn’t even tell Tim. “[I]f he knows that he has Mosaic Down Syndrome, he’s gonna use that for a crutch. Big time. So, we decided, you know, we’re just not going to tell him until he gets a little bit older…” This secrecy didn’t protect Tim from pain though. “By junior high, Tim was starting to have a hard time fitting in with other kids.” Other children would insult him, pick on him, and tease him. Later on, when Tim was around 13, Kristy told him about his disease. Amazingly, Tim wasn’t upset. He actually told his classmates, and they “started cutting him some slack. He wasn’t the ‘weird kid’ anymore; he was the kid with ‘that Mosaic Down thing.’” Once Tim’s classmates finally knew why Tim was so odd, they treated him better. When people didn’t really know Tim as a person and only knew that Tim had a medical condition, they were fine with letting him do whatever he wanted. When people knew Tim but didn’t know about his condition, they bullied him. But, when those people found out that Tim had Mosaic Down Syndrome, they began treating him better. Since people treat others differently because of their IQ, Kristy was forced to hide Tim’s disability from him. If we treated everyone the same, no matter their intelligence, Tim would’ve been saved a lot of trouble and