Blue Suit Mom Great Find: Trickomatics By Jim Praytor Ever lie awake worried about your children? It’s the three a.m. conversation with yourself that starts with the gnawing question—“Am I doing enough for my kids?” Does this ring a bell? If so, you’re not alone. Every parent wants to prepare their children for the big, scary, competitive world that awaits them when they leave the cocoon of childhood—everyone including Rebecca Ehrlich, a speech-language pathologist in New York City. She was one of those people staring at the ceiling at three a.m., wondering if she could do more for her children. Only they weren’t her own children she was worried about—they were other people’s children, the kids she was tutoring in after-school programs who were struggling to understand core math concepts. So who do we blame? Sure, public education is an easy target. Despite larger class sizes and shrinking budgets, schools are expected to perform better with far less. Complicating the issue is the fact that children are being asked to learn more than their parents did when they were their age. Add to it the speed at which teachers must work to accomplish grade level standards, and it becomes painfully clear why so many kids are being left behind. But here’s the deal—plenty of smart kids struggle with core math concepts. Just ask Rebecca. “I was one of those kids. I know what it feels like to believe that your brain isn’t wired for math. I know what it’s like to feel stupid in a classroom, and it’s a horrible feeling. I can understand why students give up, and what each and every one of those students needs to understand is that it is not them. It is how they’re being taught.” Despite Rebecca’s post-graduate degrees and honors, she struggled with something as simple as calculating a tip to a restaurant meal. Enter Barrett, Rebecca’s future husband, a successful investment banker with a passion for numbers. “One night I mustered up the confidence to ask him, how do you calculate numbers like that? I’ll never forget that night—in mere seconds he showed me some simple tricks that changed the way I looked at math.” Rebecca found that the methods Barrett taught her were created in ancient Asia hundreds of years ago. Wanting to know more, Rebecca looked at math test scores from around the world and discovered that the most successful students share one trait in common—they think in numbers. Armed with this realization, she brought this discovery to her school district as well as the students she tutors after school. When met with startling results, she couldn’t stop there. She needed to share her new teaching techniques with everyone. So together with Barrett, they combined their passions and created a fun, entertaining, and effective math program using an alternative approach of Hollywood entertainment and interactive technology for teaching children, ages 7–11, how to think in numbers. To learn more about this revolutionary new product, visit Trickomatics.com. And start getting more sleep at night. Jim Praytor: After a successful career supervising post-production and producing/directing for the hit sitcoms Roseanne and Home Improvement respectively, Mr. Praytor decided that what he really wanted to do was play professional basketball. Failing miserably to be anything other than short, slow, and fatally white, Jim settled on a writing career instead, landing a much sought-after freelance assignment on David Kelly’s breakthrough comedy Ally McBeal. Milking this opportunity for all that he could, he made writing a full-time gig, working on two different series for Kevin Williamson (Wasteland and Glory Days), writing for the critically acclaimed series Keen Eddie and the fan-favorite Crossing Jordan, among others. In addition, he’s written pilots for Fox, NBC, and the WB. Mr. Praytor is currently writing the live-action/animated family feature Monsters In a Jar for MPower Productions, developing The Tom and Jerry Show for Warner Brothers Animation, and working on his outside jump shot in hopes that the NBA will radically lower their standards.