I’m the author of “The Fire Can’t Get You if the Asthma Gets You First!“, this time with a very cute story from after I transferred to a different middle school.
This middle school had a very unorthodox reward system in place for students. Our mascot was a wildcat (insert High School Musical jokes here), and the reward was simply called “Paws”.
These Paws were a little three-inch square of paper with a lion pawprint on them and two lines: one for the student’s name, and one for the name of the teacher who issued it. Students earned them through various means–helping teachers, behaving in class, getting perfect scores on difficult assignments, and things like that– and would collect them. One thing to note was that teachers often didn’t give Paws out to a student two days in a row, so as not to seem like they were showing favoritism.
What was the point of collecting them, you may ask? Well, these Paws were a currency!
On Fridays during the lunch period, there was a small school store that would open, and we could buy things with the Paws we’d earned. Candy and snacks, books, crayons and colored pencils, small toys, things like that. The reason for having our names on the Paws was to ensure we weren’t using another student’s Paws for a purchase.
When I first enrolled, I didn’t know what Paws were for, and was a little confused when, on my second day, one of my teachers came over to my desk and slipped a little piece of paper with a pawprint on it under my notebook–I don’t even remember how I earned it.
After class, I hung back for a moment to ask about it; she explained that the Paws were used to buy things at the school store at lunch on Friday. I was excited–my old school didn’t have anything like this!
I did my best to earn as many Paws as I could during the week. Being the new, awkward kid in class, I probably seemed like an overachiever, but I was too excited to care. By the end of the week, I had earned about ten Paws altogether.
Friday rolled around, and come lunchtime, the gates of the kingdom opened. Each table of five students was called one at a time to shop in the school store, and it was at this point that I learned that the ten Paws I had earned were…meager. One student had a manila folder packed to the brim with Paws he had accumulated over a few weeks, one student had an inch-thick stack bound with rubber bands…
When it was our class’s turn to go shopping, I brought my piddling ten Paws in…and I realized why the students had saved so many.
This store was PACKED full of cute stationery, snacks, and the like. Small items, like erasers or singular pencils, were one Paw apiece, but other items like stylized notebooks or honey buns were five. To get anything of note, you needed to save up. I guess it was to teach us the value of saving money or something, without actually using money?
One thing in particular caught my eye–a pack of twistable colored pencils. In the singular week I’d been there, it was no secret that I loved to draw, and loved to get my hands on new art supplies. The pack was eighteen colors–including shimmering metallic colors. It would have been amazing to work with.
It was also fifteen Paws, and there was only one left.
There wasn’t any guarantee that it would have still been there next week–there was another lunch period, after all, and we also weren’t the last table called in. Someone else might buy it before I could save enough to get it.
It was a bummer, but I accepted that I probably wouldn’t be able to get them. Instead, I used my Paws to buy myself two spiral-bound college-ruled notebooks and returned to my seat dejected but not empty-handed.
I ended up having to step away to use the restroom as lunch was working through me a bit too quickly for my liking, and tucked my notebooks into my binder for safekeeping as I had been the first one to come back to our table. I was gone all of five minutes, and when I came back…there was something in my seat.
The pack of twistable colored pencils.
One of the other kids at my table had a very tiny smile on her face while she watched me put two and two together.
Those colored pencils saw a LOT of use.