My teacher’s clever Kleenex scheme

In grade school we were usually short on Kleenex. The one school-supplied box of tissue paper was not going to cut it for 25 sniffling kids. It was especially bad during allergy season and snowy days.

My third grade teacher devised an ingenious bribe. At the beginning of the year, he offered us 10 extra credit points if we brought in two boxes.

Naturally all of us went home and begged out parents to buy Kleenex. And sure enough, every single person showed up to class with Kleenex.

It later dawned on me how clever this all was. Since all of us brought Kleenex, we were all getting 10 extra credit points and thus the extra credit really had no beneficial impact on our grade.

But we were just happy our classroom was well-supplied. And it goes to show that if something’s broken, it is often a good idea to change the game.



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  • Craig

    That’s only true if your 3rd grade teacher used a relative grading scale, which would surprise me. I’ve certainly never used one in any of my college courses!

  • http://tobym.posterous.com Toby

    Everyone receiving the same 10 bonus points doesn’t preclude the points from still helping everyone, unless your third grade teacher was grading on a curve.

  • Christina

    I was just going to say what Craig and Tony said, but when I clicked reply saw that it’d already been said. :) Grades are not competitive in elementary school.

    On a side note, that strategy doesn’t work NEARLY as well as a high school teacher – when kids have 7 classes it’s a lot harder! :P

  • Mobiustripper

    Agreed with Tony and everyone else. There’s a lot at stake here than just grades (which is the lease important since it’s 3rd graders). Something like this will earn brownie points for the kids and help them make more friends; there’s maximum social benefit of having more than enough kleenex, especially in the allergy season; and pooling in resources will help the school cut down costs and thus divert those funds to other important things (not much in the case of savings from Kleenex, but maybe in other cases). The positive externalities are immense to be ignored.

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