I use a color printer and print out and cut up my play money which I give out to students as incentives and rewards. They can then spend their savings in my “store” or use them to buy the conventional “Karma” stamps that the other teachers use and which can go toward coupon books for local businesses (this is boring and not very incentivizing, in my opinion, which is why I started doing my play money).
My play money is called “Alligator bucks.” And long ago, when I was doing it at Hongnong Elementary, I became aware that there was a certain class of student who would use technology to try to increase his wealth. I have a student, currently, who took some alligator bucks home, scanned them, and then printed them out on a color printer of his own. Their quality is pretty good, and they are now in circulation. But they’re not perfect – and mostly I got lucky because I had preemptively taken to using a stamp with a fairly unique design to stamp the backs of the alligator bucks. Two-sided color copying is more challenging.
This is all par-for-the-course when dealing with a large and diverse group of grade-schoolers. But what’s interesting and funny to me, today, is that I saw this enterprising young future mafioso passing out his counterfeit alligator bucks to his friends for free, and he was signing each one – like little works of art. This seemed to defeat the purpose of counterfeiting them, but it was very cute. He was buying status with his fake alligator bucks, just winning the admiration of his peers for having tried to make them. He signed one on the back and gave it to me, grinning. “Do you like it?” he asked. “I like it so much.”
