dont be scared Charlie you done so much with so little I think you deserv it most of all." She is encouraging him in a way that makes him feel as if she respects him. Through most of his life, Charlie has not gotten much respect from the people around him, including his own family. In fact, early on he tells Dr. Strauss, “Miss Kinnian always said Charlie be proud of your job because you do it good.”

When he sees her for the first time after his treatment, Miss Kinnian says, “I have confidence in you Charlie the way you struggled so hard to read and right better than all the others. At werst you will have it for a littel wile and your doing somthing for sience.” This also indicates that Miss Kinnian is idealistic. She wants Charlie to do this both for himself and for what he might achieve for science and for mankind in general.

As he reaches a comparable intellectual level, he also realizes that she is young and lovely. He writes, “I never noticed how beautiful Miss Kinnian really is. She has brown eyes and feathery brown hair that comes to the top of her neck. She's only thirty-four!” Unsurprisingly, she also displays insecurity when Charlie surpasses her intellectually. He writes that he tried “to keep the conversation on a simple, everyday level, but she just stared at me blankly... When I tried to explain she stopped me and laughed.”

Her laugh is likely twofold. On the one hand, she is thrilled for Charlie that the experiment has worked. On the other hand, she realizes that she cannot keep up with him, and it is a laugh of embarrassment. She also comforts him when he has problems getting close to her.

Then sadly, when Charlie begins to decline and refuses to see her, she cries. “Miss Kinnian came to the door but I said go away I dont want to see you. She cried and I cried too.” She is empathetic and sad for Charlie as well as for herself because it seemed that she reciprocated the romantic feelings he had for her. Then when he mistakenly attends her class, “She startid to cry and run out of the room.”

In Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, Miss Kinnian does much to help Charlie. She is his teacher at a school for adults with learning disabilities, and she sees his potential. Though he has a very low IQ, he has a lot of motivation to learn. Charlie had found the school himself and had the desire to follow through.

Because of this, Miss Kinnian recommends Charlie for the surgery in Dr. Strauss' and Dr. Nemur's experiment. After Charlie has the operation, Miss Kinnian continues to work with Charlie and to encourage him along the way. At some point Charlie surpasses her, and she sees it coming before Charlie does. Miss Kinnian says,

"'I can only see a little bit of that, Charlie, and I won't go much higher than I am now, but you'll keep climbing up and up, and see more and more, and each step will open new worlds that you never even knew existed'" (Keyes 22).

Miss Kinnian helps Charlie throughout, but when she realizes he is going to lose everything he worked for, she is very upset. Later, Charlie shows back up at her class because he has completely regressed, and Miss Kinnian runs out of the room crying.

As the story opens, Miss Kinnian is teaching Charlie spelling and reading at a night school. He writes in his journal in response to a question about how he found the class that:

sumbody told me where I shud go to lern to read and spell good.

We learn that Charlie is very determined to go to the night school because he wants to learn and become smart. This is also why he is willing to submit to the operation that will boost his brain power, even though he is warned it will probably only be temporary. It's also clear that he doesn't fully understand the implications of what he is getting himself into.

We learn as well that Miss Kinnian thinks Charlie is the person in her class who would be best for the operation and that she thinks he deserves it most of all.

When Miss Kinnian and Charlie have dinner on April 28, his intelligence is growing by leaps and bounds, but it has not yet reached its peak. He has, however, transitioned from treating Miss Kinnian with the awe a child might have for a favorite teacher to treating her as an equal. As he says, every time he sees her she seems younger to him:

I think from the beginning I had the feeling that she was an unreachable genius-and very, very old. Now, every time I see her she grows younger and more lovely.

We learn of some of their evening dinner conversation. Miss Kinnian is still acting as a mentor to Charlie. She tells him that he is learning so fast she'll soon be left behind by him. She informs him that what he has learned in a few weeks takes the average person half a lifetime to absorb. She then says that she hopes to God—and breaks off. But at this point, Charlie is perceptive enough to know what she means: she hopes the experiment won't turn out to be a failure.

One can imagine, however, that Miss Kinnian would have had more to talk about than the experiment and Charlie's intelligence. She indicates she is relaxed with him by lighting a cigarette. She might have talked to him about books he was reading or that she had read, as well about everyday events going on in both their lives. It is possible he asked her about her interests and hobbies in an attempt to get to know her better and that she would have been willing to discuss these aspects of herself with him.