I have in hand a number of “Challenge Coins” which I’ve been calling “Mystery Coins”, by which I mean coins which I’ve flipped, meaning spent more money on than the penny originally called for. But why did I flip that particular coin? It’s a Mystery. YOU have to guess/decide/see what it was about this coin that prompted me to spend good hard cash on it over and above its 1 cent face value. Why plunk down more money on a worthless coin??? Obviously, because to me, it’s worth more than a penny. But why? And how much more?
Why in the world would I wish to preserve this particular coin?
Sometimes it isn’t obvious. Mostly it’s subtle. Once it a while, it’s In-Yer-Face.
In a nutshell, that’s the nature of the Academy Challenge Coin, and it can happen on a number of increasingly difficult levels — it’s up to you how much challenge you want to take on.
Academy Challenge Coins are WEEEIIIIIRRRRRRDDDD. Look it up in your Funk & Wagnall’s under “weird” or “weirdness”.
Weird is what I say, weird is what I mean. Each and every Academy Challenge Coin has a mystery attached to it, and I alone have the solution to that mystery.
I keep it recorded in my Academy Registry Database.
There’s an entry for YOUR coin in my Academy Registry Database, along with every other Academy coin we track.
Why track it? So I’ll know what coin you’re talking about without you having to send me the coin, that’s why. Shipping is costly, expensive and you have to pay a lot for it, too. Besides, you risk the coin’s loss or damage every time you ship it out.
You can send for as many Academy Challenge Coins as you like at only $5 apiece, mounted in a flip with double Academy Markers, the top of which bears the Academy Registry Number, which is how we can track what you have in hand and what you should find on the coin you’re currently studying.
I ship out Academy Training Coins and Academy Challenge Coins every day now, along with the regular shipments of Academy Reference Coins.
Oops, I guess I better tell you now what the differences are between those types of Academy coins, huh?
Training coins, you know what it is — it’s labeled. There’s no doubt that that’s that there thing, and nothing else like it. In short, it’s a sort of challenge reference coin.
Then there’s the Academy Challenge Coin. I guess you’d say that it’s a weird looking coin with some anomaly about it that we’re supposed to notice. We don’t care what its commercial value is, it’s a study in seeing.
The Academy Reference Coin, you couldn’t afford.
These are kept under lock and key for the use of class members in advanced courses. Their values make them impractical for general classroom use, especially in a high school environment.
There are also 2 Coin Single Mounts that simulate the experience of finding a high-grade coin. These make the experience available to 20, 30 or 200 students at a time, making the general effect somewhat uproarious and ecstatic.
Exhilaration even at finding/seeing a simulation? You bet! And there’s plenty more educational breakthrough methods on the way, a gift from my universe to yours!
Academy Challenge Coins are typically mounted in flips unless you specify classroom mountings, which are temp-sealed academy study style slabs, not intended for resale, for which, as I’ve mentioned, add $5 more.
There’s a LOT of admin in searching, finding, mounting, identifying and evaluating and then tracking these puppies, keeping good records of that particular coin’s characteristics and idiosyncrasies, and maintaining a high-quality service response to your questions and conclusions regarding them.
Each coin sent out is UNIQUE. You’ll have to pardon the caps — I want to make the point very, very clear, that this is a high-density high-attention and highly personalized educational service being provided, and it takes a number of very dedicated folks to run it right.
In the higher challenge levels, some of the coins are more expensive, some cheap. Up to you which ones you want to receive. I have coins valued at prices from dirt cheap to moon. All prices are classroom based. There are no miraculous riches in the teaching tools — they’re meant to show you the ropes so you can catch yer own fish!
You can select the difficulty level of the coins you’d like to receive, but I can’t reveal what type of weirdness I’ll be sending, or it wouldn’t be a Mystery, eh?
I merely take the next five or ten or fifteen coins out of the “Weirdness” bin, mount them up as you indicate — in flip for $5 or in fancy slab for an additional $5, and then study — and record in our “admin” files — the idiosyncrasies of YOUR coin or coins, then ship it or them out with correct numbering and recording in our Academy Database. Whew! I work hard for my dollar a day room & board!
When you email me with your conclusions about that coin, I match the number you give me with the number in my database. I then email you with something on the order of the following:
You moron. Come on, Maggot!!! You can do better than that!!!
Well, I won’t always have my “First Shirt” stripes on, and it might sound more like:
Golly, I can’t imagine how you missed a huge RPM with a gaping hole on the east side, like that monstrosity you’ve got there. Well, I’ve told you what it was you were looking for, doggone it, so I guess that’s blown. Want another? Contact me when you find another five bucks.
If, on the other hand, you have the uncommon luck of the beginner, you might guess correctly, albeit wildly, that it is an RPM. You have a lot of clues besides the obvious visual one on the coin itself. The price alone should clue you that it isn’t an FS-101 DDO of any kind.
But…even at $5 I might be able to send some sort of double. Perhaps two pennies with the same date and mint-mark?
So if you do manage somehow to transcend into rectitude, your correct analysis of the coin should result in a response from me that reads more or less like this:
Your wild guesswork paid off — the coin is indeed an RPM. So What? Big Deal? Can you do it again???
What I’ll want to see then is whether you’re able to see anything at all unusual about the coin I sent you. Later on, I’ll want to know if you can distinguish an RPM from an OMM, whatever the heck that means.
Ohhhhh, you’d like me to explain what RPM and OMM mean, eh?
What am I, a walking dictionary? Before you answer that, lemme explain: if I put all the answers in your lap as True/False or Multiple Choice, I’ll be committing the same miserable teaching mistake made by the current educational system. Learning to parrot is not learning.
Most of what you’ll learn from in the coin fieild will be personal experience personally experienced. There is no substitute, and information is not experience, although experience can potentially unleash very high energetics of information.
What you’re trying to do here is to accumulate enough experience that you’ll recognize an error coin of any kind when you see one.
Eventually, this will transfer over to your general view of the universe and open it up beyond the Einsteinian Veil, into the World of Quantum, where everything is everything else, and it’s all about Jellyfish.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby