This time of the year offers many opportunities for personal reflection.  For those of us raised in the Judeo-Christian faiths, the celebration of the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and the birth of Jesus are events that mark centuries of traditions and religious faith.  For people of these and other faiths, the end of the year and the beginning of the New Year on January 1 are times to celebrate the passage of time and to mark new opportunities in the year ahead.

In America, we are transitioning the leadership of our government which we have done every four or eight years since 1792.  This year, the voters wanted change.  The Obama administration has promised change while facing the formidable challenges associated with stepping into the leadership role of the world’s largest economic engine during a global and domestic economic crisis which is unprecedented since the Great Depression.  By all accounts, the situation has not reached its bottom and it will be years before we climb out of a trough created by our own hands.   Even worse is the knowledge that many of the “solutions” may be politically inspired and not the “best” solutions for the situation.

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On Monday, December 15, fifteen higher ed associations sent a letter to Congress asking that a portion of the Obama economic stimulus plan be allocated to higher education.  The letter indicates that 18 million Americans are attending higher education institutions, and since 18 million represents six percent of all Americans, a corresponding six percent of the allocation should go to higher ed.  The letter’s proposal is organized into three parts: Student Aid, Infrastructure Grants, and Additional Student Centered Recommendations.

This proposal correctly cites the number of Americans studying in higher education programs. However, the figure of 18 million includes a significant number of part-time, working adults (36% of all undergraduates and 61% of students at two year institutions), and historically, the part-time working adult cohort has been excluded or overlooked by many higher education lobbying efforts. Regrettably, this letter, although widely endorsed by a great number of reputable associations, is no exception.

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The other day, my wife and I were at a friend’s house and he showed us an electronic device called FlashMaster.  His daughter was having trouble with her math facts and her fifth grade teacher recommended that her parents purchase one of these devices.  I liked it as well and purchased one for my daughters.

Chuck Resor of Jackson Hole, Wyoming invented FlashMaster after becoming frustrated with other educational technologies.   The short biography provided on the FlashMaster website states that Chuck’s most relevant qualification for inventing the product is that he is a parent himself who also struggled with how to most effectively supplement the math training his own children received.  He hired an engineering firm to craft his concept and a Chinese manufacturing firm to build it.  The gadget is a little bigger than a Nintendo DS and probably not as much fun.  However, for those of you who think that today’s elementary school programs do not teach the basic fundamentals of math (math facts) and whose children do not respond well to flash cards, this is the tool for you.

FlashMaster comes with an instruction booklet; but it is written for teachers and parents.  On the front page, the guide recommends that the device be handed to children to learn as much as they can about how it works without reading the directions.  There are nine levels each of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  You can set the level of difficulty for each as well as the time that you want to answer all thirty questions at each level.  The problem is displayed on a screen and you type in the keys corresponding to the numeric answer.  If you get an answer wrong, a little beep is registered and the question is automatically stored for a review at the end.  You can also change the format of your question from straightforward (1+2 = ?) to (? + 2 = 3) or (1 + ? = 3).  At the highest level and the shortest time, you really have to know your math facts to answer thirty multiplication and division questions correctly.  There’s even a memory function that allows the student or the student’s teacher or parents to review which questions the student missed while using Flashmaster. 

Our girls enjoy using the device and challenge each other with how many questions they could answer correctly in a sixty second, 150 second, or 180 second time period.   I am confident that they will improve their math facts while playing with the Flashmaster.  I am not related to Chuck, do not know Chuck, and do not have a financial relationship with Chuck.  Chuck, many thanks for inventing this device.  I wish that I had.  I think it is one of the best tools for improving basic math skills and I think we need millions of them in America, particularly in elementary classrooms.

In 2003, Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske published the book Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods…And How Companies Create Them.  As partners at The Boston Consulting Group, Silverstein, Fiske (now the CEO of Eddie Bauer Holdings, Inc.) and others worked to research the consumer purchasing trends in the United States and overseas.  The phenomenon that they identified was the willingness of consumers to pay a premium for certain goods even in times of economic downturns.  Identified as “trading up,” the researchers also identified that consumers often “trade down” in order to afford the items for which they “trade up.”  In fact, they state that the effect of luxury brands in a market segment is to cause that category to polarize where the growth and profits move to the high and low ends of the spectrum while “companies caught in the middle struggle to succeed and survive.”  The authors provide a historical perspective that the trend to trade up has been around for centuries and that economists from Adam Smith to Thorstein Veblen to John Kenneth Galbraith have observed the trend of consumers to buy goods that cost more than what most others can afford to pay.

Silverstein and Fiske believe that the trading up phenomenon is positive and is driven by middle class consumers who are aware of the price/value ratio of what they are purchasing.  Furthermore, they state that so many middle class consumers are able to afford premium goods that the conventional wisdom of “higher price, lower volume” does not follow the trading up phenomenon.  Instead, the middle class consumers have a stronger emotional attachment with their luxury purchases than with other goods.  That emotional attachment is why they choose to ignore the mid-price product.  Silverstein and Fiske believe that the consumers have no desire to purchase a product that offers “neither a price advantage nor a functional or emotional benefit.”

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Holidays are often a time for family gatherings and homecomings.  I am fortunate to be part of a large and extended family.  When I was young, my parents would visit my mother’s parents on all of the major holidays; particularly Thanksgiving and Christmas.  My grandparents lived on a farm where eleven of their twelve children were born (my aunt, Christy, was the twelfth and the only child to be born in a hospital).  Six of my mother’s seven brothers served in World War II and the seventh served in the Korean Conflict.  An older sister served as a nurse in the Army Air Corps.  We were fortunate that all of them returned home safely at the wars’ end.

I believe that my grandmother viewed holidays as the opportunity to bring her family back together.  It did not matter that she had to coordinate the logistics of preparing food for over fifty people at a time; it was a labor of love.  Her daughters and daughters-in-law would bring dishes or specialties; and the grandchildren/cousins would sample them.  One year, I remember gathering a healthy helping of what I presumed to be mashed potatoes only to find out that it was mashed turnips after taking my first bite.  I always asked after that.  After dinner, some or all of the forty plus cousins would gather for a football game or kick-the-can.  We could usually count on a younger uncle or two to join us.  Philosophically, I would not say that those were “the best years,” but those years have a fond place in my heart and in my memories.

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I bought the first version of the book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, which was written by Chip and Dan Heath and published in 2007.  I just read on the authors’ blog that the new version is available which essentially adds a chapter and some additional 30 pages of content.

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education and is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an enterprise dedicated to figuring out how to build a textbook without text but with using videos and other technologies.  Chip’s research led him to wonder why urban legends and conspiracy theories had a way of spreading around socially, “sticking” so to speak.  Dan’s research at Thinkwell led him to conclude that the best professors and lecturers had a similar way of conveying the point to their students and classes.  Being brothers with a keen interest in education, the two decided to write and publish this book.

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