It cracks me up how sticker oriented I was. I was all, here's my paper GIMME MY STICKER WHOO I HAZ STIKR!
And then we went and taught, wherein we had to resolve yesterday's Stickergate! One of our students just passed her Book #1 and we made a big fuss, and now everyone is all sticker crazy. One of the students has been kinda notorious for skipping ahead in the book, without telling you, so that you think the other person passed him, and you didn't realize. But, kiddo, those songs are in difficulty order, and now you're struggling with the ones you're pretending to play.
So, we started enforcing sticker checks, where if he claimed to be on a page, we looked back to make sure that the previous songs had stickers on them. SO yesterday, as soon as we turned our backs, he pulled off the stickers from the previous songs and put them on the current songs, as if he'd successfully passed them. Only now we're on to his nefarious game, and checked with each other. Did you pass him? Nope. Did you? Nope.
But he's super fragile emotionally, so today was individual lesson day, and the SO decided to give him a save face way to deal with it. Oops, he said, we noticed some of these old pages don't have stickers on them, so we're not sure exactly where you are in the book. Let's go back and make sure we get those down before we move on. So kiddo is super down, because he knows we know, and more because he has to go back and, you know, actually do the work. But he will be much better off for it. And now the SO is signing the pages, "Good job!" like a real music teacher, so he can't even renew his old shenanigans unless he gets good at forging our handwriting.
But, yeah, it's funny how reward oriented we can get, even trival rewards.