Pink vs. Yellow

   One day our teacher arrived at school with her arms filled with seed catalogs. She plopped them on her desk at the front of the room. When all of us little girls crowded around her asking what we would be doing with them she just smiled and told us we would have to wait and see.
    Before math classes started for the day she handed out pieces of paper. On the top she had written.

• 100  = yellow
• 90's = red
• 80's = pink
• 70's = green
• Below 70 = brown or black

    We all stared at it slightly confused until she explained that every day when we got our math scores we could cut a picture out of a seed catalog and glue it to the paper. The color of the picture we got would depend on our grade.
    I usually got a hundred percent, and I envisioned my piece of paper filled with sweetcorn, yellow beans, and if I was lucky enough to get there before someone else took it, maybe a yellow rose or two.
     I didn't particularly care for the color yellow to begin with, so I came to the perfect solution. I would simply have to get some wrong every time and hopefully be able to have my grade fall in the 80's and be able to fill my piece of paper with pink flowers.
    I got a few reds to begin with until I learned I need to get more answers wrong in order to get my desired pink. Somehow it didn't register that good grades were more desirable than pink pictures.
    I got quite a few pinks until the day when I miscalculated and had too many wrong and got a much dreaded brown picture.
    When report card time rolled around Daddy and Mom noticed the significant drop in my math grades and finally found out what I was doing.
    From that day forward my papers no longer looked pretty. It was just as I had feared. Pictures of sweet corn were the main thing on them.