A fairly good reward

I have a reward system, similiar to many others in the corps. Throughout the week I give out tickets to my students. It could really be for anything...it's up to me...it is nice to have power... I might give one out for a student volunteering coming to the board and working out a warm-up problem. Or I might give one out to students who get A's on a test. Perhaps a shy student who doesn't do too well is asking me more questions. In my worse-behaving classes, I might give them out to all the students who are doing exactly as I had asked the entire class to do, just being quiet and taking notes. I might give one out to someone who helps me clean the board or collect calculators. They hold on to them until after class. They rip them in half, and are responsible for keeping up with their half of the ticket. I have separate containers for each class period, and on their way out of the classroom, they put their ticket in the container that I am holding. Every Monday (used to be Fridays, but it's a nice way to start the week) I draw 3 tickets, reading the number that matches their half of a ticket: one for a homework pass, one for a free test question, and one for cookies (usually 6, sometimes I buy them, sometimes I bake them, depending on my time). The student picked first gets to pick which "prize" she wants, then the next student chooses what's left, and so forth. If a student gets their ticket drawn twice the same day, it doesn't matter; they only win once (which has happened often). I dump out the tickets every 9 weeks, but really, I think it should be more often, maybe every twice a 9 weeks or once every 2 or 3 weeks, because so many students lose their tickets that I waste a lot of time reading tickets that no one has anymore.

So that's it! They love it. It gets students to go to the board to work problems more than anything else. I need to try to find more ways to give them to the quiet, yet hard-working students. Oh, and I do have one rule: If you ASK for a ticket (after doing a good deed or working a problem) you don't get one. They should be rewarded for what they do, not do things to be rewarded (which I'm sure they do sometimes anyway). Sometimes a classmate might suggest another student deserves one, as a gentle reminder to moi.

Not too creative, but you'd be surprised how much they want those tickets...