Personally, I don’t think paying for grades is like real life. In the real world, MAYBE you’ll get a merit bonus or salary increase at your job. You might not. It depends on the company. It depends how the company is doing. It depends on the line of work. But you are expected to do your job and do it well, period. Also, if you are not up to par at your job, you get fired most likely (yes, don’t give me anecdotal evidence to the contrary, I’m making a generalization). So my feeling is that A-B work is expected unless the child truly has some learning problems or something. Why pay for expected work output? You go above and beyond, ok, we’ll talk.
And just curious, are we talking 1K for the entire year, per semester, per quarter?
On the other hand, I’m cool with motivation techniques but I like the event ideas more than $. I’ll never forget in 3rd grade my teacher saying that the first 3 kids who tested through and passed all of their multiplication tables would be able to go out to lunch with the teacher. You better believe I was number 1 baby! But, my 3rd grade teacher was HOT and I totally had a crush on him. All 3 of the top kids were GIRLS; the boys weren’t motivated with lunch with a dude. So, the motivation has to be right for the kid. Growing up, a particular gift or event would have been more motivating for me than $.
Side note, I was an A student since birth and it was always just expected of me. My brother, C’s, though he was very intelligent. My mom made a deal with him in 10th grade that if he made the honor roll (the bottom one, the 3.0 GPA one) that he would get a TV and cable in his room. Um, he made the honor roll for ONE QUARTER and got the TV and cable for 2 more years. WTF? That didn’t work.
And LOL on the goal scored on your own team! That’s classic.
