Oct

22

I’d Come To School If I Got Paid.

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Goals 

I heard it again last week:”I’d come to school if I got paid.” Oh, how many times have I heard that over the years. Every year some kids tell me their attendance would be better if they got paid to go to school. I’ve had numerous, long discussions with students about the fact that they do get paid: they get paid in credits that give them a diploma. But, they don’t care if they earn credits towards a diploma. They don’t care about deferred payments for a better future. They want money now - don’t we all in today’s consumer society.A

few years ago, I had a particularly unmotivated group of students who were always whining about not getting paid for going to school. I thought about all this and decided that I would pay them. I would pay them for going coming to my class. I would pay them for being good students. I created my own “money” which my students could earn when I caught them being good. I designed a “dollar bill” , a Hartjes dollar, and photocopied it on green paper We had a lot of fun with it. The kids threatened to counterfeit it by photocopying it, but no one ever did.( Each dollar had my signature on it) There was intense competition to see who could earn the most Hartjes dollars. I told them I would not replace any Hartjes dollars that were lost so they better take care of them. Some kids even put my dollars in their wallets for safe keeping. It was great fun.
What could the kids buy for their Hartjes dollars? They could spend the money they earned in my class to buy certain things: to get 10 minutes of free time on the computer, to get out of writing a quiz, to get out of class 10 minutes early; to get to come to class ten minutes late, to get to sit and do nothing for ten minutes etc. I asked the students what they would like to buy and that’s what I “sold”. I also had monthly auctions where they could bid for things like movie passes, gift certificates for CD.s, and gift certificates for food at local fast food restaurants. The auctions were wild.

The Hartjes dollar not only motivated my students in my classroom but also provided an opportunity to talk about money in general: what people chose to spend it on, why some people saved their money while other spent it right away, why we had money in the first place, using credit wisely etc. The Hartjes dollars were a hit.

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