In third grade, my teacher had an incentive program called superkids. Every time you did well on a homework assignment, or test, you were awarded a superkid certificate. Once you collected ten or so of these things, you could redeem them for a pencil or an eraser.
This program did not work on me.
My birthday occurs right at the beginning of the school year, so each year I received more than enough school supplies for my birthday to last me the entire year. So, each time I got one of these certificates, I saved it. I wondered if possibly I saved up enough, I might be able to redeem it for something amazing by the end of the year. That was a nice thought, but mostly I just didn’t know what to do with them.
The teacher’s policy for handing them out was perhaps a little too liberal, as I ended up with a lot of these certificates.
By the middle of the year, my teacher was getting rather puzzled about why she had to keep making more and more copies of these certificates. This all came to a head one morning when I was pulling out a sheet of paper for a test, and the teacher saw a massive pile of the certificates crammed into my binder. That wasn’t even with the two stacks of them that I was now leaving at home because they were breaking my binders.
“Michael!” she asked. “What are you doing?”
I had something of a frugal nature. I would use the same sheet of paper for multiple assignments until there wasn’t enough room left on the page for anything else before going to another sheet of paper. I really took that whole ‘Reduce Reuse Recycle’ mantra to heart.
At this point, I became the bank of superkids. Whenever the teacher needed to give some out to other students (she didn’t bother giving me anymore), she would come to me and I’d give her a stack of them from my cache. At the end of the year, I gathered up the plenty I still had and gave them all back to her.
I sometimes wonder if she, assuming she’s still teaching, uses that same method. If so, does she still have any of those superkid certificates left over from that year. She certainly had plenty!
