From the Homeschool Front … CyberPatriot by Colleen Hroncich

When my 15-year-old daughter asked if we could start a CyberPatriot team, my initial thought was “No.” It’s not that I didn’t support the idea. I learned about CyberPatriot several years ago. Sponsored by the Air Force Association, it sounded like an amazing program. Kids form teams, learn about cyber security, and work in online competitions to find and fix security flaws in virtual machines. 

The reason I wanted to say “No” when my daughter asked was that I know next to nothing about the inner workings of computers. Like any mom who wants to push off a major decision, I told my daughter “I’ll think about it.” Like any experienced daughter, she knew that meant “probably not.”

My kids know I like them to take initiative. We have a busy life. If they wait for me to make things happen for them, they’re going to miss out on some opportunities. So my daughter asked if she could contact a computer science professor at a local college to see if he’d serve as a mentor if we started a team. To my surprise, he immediately agreed.

In addition to finding a mentor, my daughter recruited 5 other kids to join her team. The mentor met with us and helped us understand the concepts involved in the competition. He showed the kids which training modules would be most important for the initial competition round. 

My daughter and I have worked together on the training modules. I now understand why websites insist on such elaborate passwords. An 8-character password with only numbers can be cracked in under one second. Add lower and upper case letters and symbols, and it’ll take up to three weeks to hack. If you bump up to 9 characters, it’ll take 5 years to crack. At 10 characters, your password is safe for up to 526 years!

The CyberPatriot program is giving my daughter and her teammates useful skills that will help them secure their own devices. It’s also exposing them to potential careers that won’t be going away anytime soon. Happily, we’re getting these benefits with little expense and a lot of flexibility. The competitions are online, so we don’t have to travel to a distant tournament site. And they can be completed at our convenience within a 6-hour window during a specified weekend.

My daughter is also learning responsibility and leadership as she tries to plan meetings that will accommodate the schedules of multiple homeschool families and a college professor. 

I’m very happy my daughter wasn’t discouraged by my “I’ll think about it” response. CyberPatriot has been a learning experience for us both. It’s definitely worth looking into for your students.

Colleen Hroncich loves that homeschooling allows her to learn right alongside her children. A published author and former policy analyst, Colleen’s favorite subjects are economics/public policy and history. She has been active in several homeschool co-ops and is a speech and debate coach.

econlife - The Rise and Fall of the Subway Five Dollar Footlong by Elaine Schwartz

The Subway footlong might never have been a foot long.

Six years ago, an Australian teenager posted on Facebook a picture of his 11-inch Subway Footlong. Feeling cheated (I guess), two New Jersey guys sued, others followed, and we wound up with a class action suit. Subway indicated the problem was frozen bread that had to be consistently stretched. They also said the slogan was an ad, not a promise.

In an initial settlement, Subway promised that they would implement new measures that guaranteed accuracy. They also agreed to pay a $520,000 legal tab and $500 to each of the ten people leading the suit. Explaining the small settlement the attorney said, “It was difficult to prove monetary damages, because everybody ate the evidence.”

But it didn’t end here. The litigation continued when yet another attorney who had nothing to do with the case said it was ridiculous. He explained that because only the lawyers made money, the decision should be thrown out. It was.

But so too was the footlong.

The Rise and Fall of the Footlong

In 2004, a Florida Subway franchisee figured out that a five dollar footlong would boost business. It was catchy, simple, cheap, and perfectly timed for a recession. At first local, by 2008, as the recession spread, the five dollar footlong did also.

Now though one store owner says the footlong costs him more than $4 to produce. In 2004 the margins were big. But, with $5.00 in 2004 the same as $7.00 today, inflation has sliced out the profit.

Our Bottom Line: Fast Food Competition

Subway’s biggest problem could be the competition. In 2019, everyone gives a discount, deli meat is no longer called healthy, and the name has become normal. Add all of that together and you get a monopolistically competitive firm that is less able to use the Five Dollar Footlong to differentiate itself.

Below, moving to the right on the market structure scale, firms become larger and more powerful. Meanwhile market entry and exit become increasingly difficult.

In a monopolistically competitive market, many firms compete for lots of customers, although firms sell similar sandwiches, they are able to achieve a bit of a “monopoly” by being different.

For Subway it was the footlong.

My sources and more: Thanks to the Planet Money Indicator podcast for alerting me to the demise of the footlong. Vox though had the whole story and Reuters, the end of the court case.

Please note that our featured image is from Subway and several sentences from today’s post were in a past econlife.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

Books from Other Countries by Wendy Buchanan

As a teacher, I am constantly looking for resources that will enhance the quality of educational opportunities for my classroom, while continually emphasizing the importance of my students’ responsibilities to their school community and families.  I try to encourage a “market,” if you will, among the people who help our students grow to be productive citizens – the parents and teachers who, together, educate our children. 

As a result, each year, I divide my class into groups where students must live as a fictitious family. They have to budget, balance a checkbook, invest in the stock market and learn about assigned countries of origin. They ended up learning about famous inventors from different countries, all the while developing valuable life skills.

After attending a Winning Ideas Weekend in San Francisco with my husband, a former izzit.org Teacher of the Year, I participated in izzit’s Win-Win Trading Game and knew instantly that I could use this activity in my own 4^th grade classroom.  I finally understood some of what my husband had been talking about all these years. At first, I struggled with the economic concepts with which my husband wished to “enlighten” me. I resisted the idea of these concepts being taught at a grammar school level. But that all changed.

It was apparent that a key concept such as free trade and the benefits of a free-market competitive society, indeed, had a place in the elementary classroom! I was ecstatic about the possibility of exposing the winning ideas of freedom into the minds of these youngsters. The question of how this would happen lingered.

It wasn’t until two years later that the idea came to me… Each year our school receives donated books. So how could we distribute these books most effectively? We decided to use izzit’s Win-Win: A Trading Game. I viewed my free copy of the Win-Win Trading Game DVD to brush up on how it should be played. And it occurred to me that our “fictitious families” from all over the world would be the perfect situation to bring the concept of free trade to the fourth grade classroom. 

Students were asked to sit with their “family” in a “country-of-origin.” Each was given a book in a sealed paper bag. Students could either keep their book or trade with the other members of their family; suddenly they had a choice.  A discussion followed regarding their limited choices within their countries. Before the students understood where this lesson was going, they insisted on trading with “other countries.”

Trading was now permitted with the other countries, and students quickly began to search for those particular books that were of interest to them. They understood, firsthand, how the simple act of being able to trade freely with the class led to a major increase in their satisfaction.

Discussion turned to global trade and the clothing everyone was wearing that morning.  Clothing tags were identified, and the origin of the clothing was mapped out on individual student maps and on the large classroom map of the world. Students became aware of the global connection associated with their clothing, and witnessed a real life example of just how free trade makes more people satisfied. In the end, my students realized the much larger picture: our freedom to choose what we trade and with whom we trade makes for a better world.

By placing this video in my hands, izzit.org has given me the necessary tools to not only reach my students this year, but for years to come. I have already lent the DVD to my fellow grade-level teachers. And during our school’s next book giveaway, all 4^th grade students will be participating in the trading game. With the addition of other “countries,” the overall satisfaction of the books donated will undoubtedly increase while promoting the concept of free trade.

By producing one high-quality video targeting a specific concept involving liberty, teachers have the opportunity to educate and enlighten millions of students, allowing them to become productive citizens. Thanks izzit.org!

“The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”  -Milton Friedman