A while ago, I was working on a math problem. It read: a vending machine offers eight different drinks. One day, six employees each purchased a drink from the vending machine. Find the probability that at least two employees purchased the same drink.
I asked myself, “who cares which employee bought what drink” and shut my book. If I owned a business, I would have a reason to care.
We have always been told that good grades will eventually pay off. For some students, they already are. This year, students in 60 New York City schools can earn up to $500 for improving their standardized English and math test scores throughout the year. In addition, Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington are participating in a program funded by Exxon/Mobil which will pay students $100 for passing AP tests.
In the District of Columbia, a public program called Capital Gains gives students checks up to $100 every two weeks for good attendance, grades, and behavior. Most of these programs are funded by philanthropists and corporations and are aimed at minority students and students in low income homes and cities.
Had I been a student in one of these states, I probably would have reluctantly missed a few more minutes of “Grey’s Anatomy” to finish reading math that question. After all, the better I do on my homework, the more likely I am to remember the material on the day of these tests. And if a wealthy and generous person wants to reward me and other students for our achievements, by all means I have no problem with that.
Many people believe that knowledge itself is a reward and when given monetary gains, students will focus more on receiving the money than on learning the material itself.
“Bribing kids for higher test scores is similar to giving them steroids,” said Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. What people such as Schaeffer forget is that students in AP classes are already motivated to do well in school. Also, scoring high on these tests can improve a student’s chance of qualifying for scholarships and earning college credits. So students are already hardwired to want rewards for doing well.
We already know that a good education will increase our salaries, which in turn will better our living conditions. The idea that money is a big part of life has been drilled into us by the time we enter high school. As a result, we work hard, go to college, graduate, and hope to get well paying jobs. To pay us for our achievements in high school, while we are still building the skills we will need for the future and learning the benefits of being hardworking individuals is logical.
It is rare to find a kid who truly cares about valence electrons and Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet. It is rare to find a kid who truly cares about quadratic functions and ATP (which, I bet, biology students do not know what it stands for). In general, students are more concerned about how what they learn will be useful and pertinent in the future rather than the material itself.
This so-called controversial issue brings out some of the hypocrisies of our society. When schools receive more money because of their increasing test scores, and struggling schools receive less, most people complacently watch. Just look at the emphasis our school places on our California Standardized Tests (CSTs). When Texas began paying teachers whose students did well on AP tests, it did not cause such a large debate among parents and educators. When parents buy their uninterested kids educational video games to entice them into learning, nobody pays much attention.
But when students can learn the value of hard work while earning some extra cash, all hell breaks loose the comments on research and articles pile up, parents and educators go off on tangents as if the “value of a dollar” and hard work lessons they have tried to instill in us for so long have just gone to waste.
Pathetic.
I believe there are two types of students: those who can sit and diligently take notes about subjects they do not care about, and then there is everyone else. For some students in the latter category, money would simply serve as an incentive to learn.
Oh, and if you are wondering, I never did solve that math problem.
