What Happens When You Give High School Students $1 And Let Them Run With It: A Teacher’s Story
The coffee in my chipped ceramic mug was still steaming on the first day of fall semester, and my 11th grade business basics class was mostly slouched into their desks, half scrolling TikTok under their hoodies when I started passing out plain white envelopes. When everyone had one, I told them to open it. A murmur rippled through the room when they each pulled out a single crumpled one-dollar bill.
Javi, who sat in the back row and rarely spoke up unless he was arguing that a homework assignment was stupid, raised his hand. “Wait, that’s it? No 10-page paper? No step-by-step rubric? What do we even do with this?”
“Turn it into as much money as you can in four weeks,” I said. “Only two rules: you can’t put any of your own money into the project, and you can’t ask people for straight donations. Every dollar you make has to come from a real transaction. That’s it. Come back in four weeks and show me what you did.”
Most teachers I work with thought I was crazy for devoting a month of class time to this. Parents email me sometimes before the project starts, worried it’s just free time with no work, or that their kid will end up with a bad grade because they don’t have connections to make big money. I’ve been doing this project for three years now, and I still didn’t expect what Mia, Ty, and Lila pulled off the first year I ran it.
Most groups went with the obvious ideas: bake sales, car washes, reselling candy out of their lockers. One group bought a single raffle ticket for a school fundraiser and won $20, then quit, ending up with a 20x return that they were very proud of. The group that tried to sell candy got shut down by administration after two days for breaking the no outside food rule, and ended the month with $8. Mia’s group was three quiet kids who rarely volunteered for class discussions: Mia turned in almost every assignment a day late, Ty worked 20 hours a week after school at a local auto shop, and Lila was the cross country team’s manager who left class 10 minutes early every day for practice.
They started by watching the parking lot for a week. They noticed that every Friday and Saturday, the local youth soccer league packed the lower fields behind the school, and the closest water was a vending machine half a mile up by the gym. Parents were always wandering up, sweating, complaining about how there was nothing to buy close by. Their dollar bought one bottle of water from that vending machine, to prove they had a real project when they asked the athletic director for permission to set up a table. They promised to split any profits with the league’s uniform fund, so he said yes. Then they walked to the grocery store down the street, told the manager what they were doing for the school project, and asked if he’d donate a few cases of water to get them started. He gave them 10 cases for free.
They sold every bottle for $2, and sold out the first Saturday. They made $120 that first weekend, reinvested it in Gatorade and granola bars, added snacks the next weekend, and by the end of the four weeks they had $3,217. When they walked in with a giant cardboard check for their presentation, Mia was grinning so wide I barely recognized her. I’d never seen her speak in front of the class for more than 10 seconds before that day.
That’s when the lesson hit me, way harder than it hit the kids. We spend so much of high school mapping every single thing out: every assignment has a rubric with 10 different categories, every step of every project is written on the worksheet, kids get told exactly what to think, exactly how to present it, exactly what grade they’ll get if they check all the boxes. When we take all that structure away, most people assume kids will mess around and get nothing done. That’s not what I see.
The practical takeaway for me, that I share with parents and other teachers all the time, is small and doable. For teachers: next time you plan a project, cut at least two mandatory steps you usually include. You don’t have to require a certain format for the final presentation, you don’t have to make them turn in a draft outline two weeks in advance. Let them figure that part out. For parents: when your kid comes to you with a half-baked idea for a side gig, a fundraiser, or even a weird school project, don’t jump in to fix it or tell them why it won’t work. Instead of asking for a full step-by-step plan right away, just ask “what’s the first small thing you can try this week?” And when they’re done, ask “what was the hardest thing you had to figure out?” before you ask “how much money did you make?” or “what grade did you get?” I grade this project 80% on the reflection essay kids write at the end, only 20% on how much money they make. That alone takes the pressure off, and kids still work harder on it than any textbook assignment.
Mia’s mom emailed me a week after that first presentation, saying Mia had talked about the project every night at dinner, something she never did for any other class. She said Mia had always avoided trying new things because she was scared of getting it wrong, but this project let her get it wrong and still learn something. The three kids donated half their profit to the soccer league’s uniform fund, like they promised, and split the other half between three local food banks. None of them kept a cent.
I still get pushback on this project. Some administrators say I should be using that time for state test prep. Some parents worry it’s unfair that kids with more connections can make more money. That’s fair, there are flaws. It’s messy, some semesters kids waste the first two weeks just messing around. But I’ve never had another assignment that teaches kids what this one does. Last year, a kid who failed the first quarter of my class wrote in his reflection, “I never knew I could figure something out without someone telling me exactly what to do at every step.”
We’re doing it again this coming fall. I have no idea what this year’s group will come up with, and that’s the point.
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