lesson 8: sometimes bribery works

"I'm getting a bit disturbed by the nature of your lessons. I'm not sure how genuinely useful they are."

"Is that for you to judge?"

"Well I think so. You did put me into this situation."

"What situation?"

"Of being your fictional interviewer."

"Do you want to go? You can you know. Just go. I can make it happen."

"Nononono... I'll stay. You're scary. OK. Fine then, so you learned about bribery. Explain."

"In grade three, my teacher bribed the class into obedience."

"How so?"

"There was a prize for almost everything. Good behavior was rewarded with stuff. Never candy of course. She was too smart for that, but she had a locked closet out of which she would pull little notebooks, kites, theatrical makeup etc... in order to get us to be quiet or pay attention. I can't imagine how much of her teacher's income she must have spent on that stuff. But overall, we had a really good class. I remember everyone pulling themselves together when she'd show that week's prize. She tracked our progress using little stars. We started with 10 and she'd rip them off as we misbehaved."

"Do you think this was a good tactic?"

"Well it seemed to work. I don't know. Probably not since life doesn't quite hand out rewards for being quiet or doing your homework in the same way. And some people seem to end up with all of their gold stars even if they misbehave."

"Did you ever win anything?"

"I talked too much and you didn't get prizes for doing other people's homework."

"Shocker. Yeah. I can see how well it worked."