Seth’s blog

Tom Perrotta, author of the novel Little Children, was an undergraduate at Yale, a graduate student at Syracuse, and a teacher at Harvard and Yale. I assume this passage from Little Children is based on that experience:

What did her in [as a graduate student] was the teaching. Some people loved it, of course, loved the sound of their own voices, the chance to display their cleverness to a captive audience. And then there were the instructors like herself, who simply couldn’t communicate in a classroom setting. They made one point over and over with mind-numbing insistence, or else they circled around a dozen half-articulated ideas without landing on a single one. They read woodenly from prepared notes, or got lost in their muddled syntax while attempting to speak off the cuff. God help them if they attempted a joke.

Curious. To “love teaching” is to love hearing your own voice and showing off. This passage seems to imply that Perrotta’s teachers either “loved teaching” in this unpleasant sense or were muddled and awkward failures. I would have thought that in a non-occupational-skills class (such as sociology, history, or literature), what a good teacher does is tell lots of stories. Apparently this didn’t happen much in Perrotta’s experience.

Surely we need sunlight to sleep properly. But how much? Rats can be synchronized to a 24-hour activity rhythm with a relatively small amount of light (such as one hour) every 24 hours. This is one reason for the emphasis on morning light by sleep doctors mentioned in a previous post.

I have agreed with them. For the last 10 years I have gotten one hour of sunlight-like light every morning from a bank of fluorescent lights on the handles of my treadmill. The lights shined up at me while I exercised and watched TV. This, I thought, allowed me to get a good dose of light with low variance in when and how much and to combine light-getting with exercise. I never questioned this routine.

Then came the event that led to this Sunlight and Sleep series: In the airport during a trip to New Orleans, a student told me when she sunbathes, she sleeps better. When I got home from my trip I tested her idea. Me, too: When I was outdoors a lot (in the shade), I slept better.

I took another trip (to Los Angeles). When I got back from that trip, I decided that I would adjust the timing of the treadmill light so that it interfered less with my day. I shifted it from 9:00 am to 10:00 am (original timing) to 8:00 am to 9:00 am (new timing).

To my surprise I started waking up too early, so often it could not be a coincidence. The only change I had made was timing of the light. So the treadmill light was making things worse! I stopped it entirely. My sleep improved — no more early awakening. Huh.

Here are details:

Period 1 (treadmill light 9-10 am, little sunlight): woke up early 29 days out of 99 (29%)

Period 2 (treadmill light 9-10 am, lots of sunlight): woke up early 1 day out of 25 (4%)

Period 3 (treadmill light 8-9 am, lots of sunlight): woke up early 4 days out 8 (50%)

Period 4 (no treadmill light, lots of sunlight): woke up early 0 days out of 8 (0%).

Lots of sunlight means 6-8 hours exposure to light of roughly 1000-2000 lux. Sitting in the shade or inside next to a big window is always enough. At the low end (1000 lux) my laptop screen is easy to read; at the high end (2000 lux), which I try to avoid, it becomes slightly hard to read.

At the San Francisco Chocolate Salon, which I attended because of my interest in connoisseurship and gifts, I learned some sad truths about elementary-school education. A San Francisco public school teacher told me:

1. The curriculum is mandated. Tests are mandated. And they disagree. For example, you are forced to teach what a certain word means. You spend two weeks teaching that word and then the tests use a different word for the same idea.

2. There is no allowance for differing rates of learning. Some kids learn faster than others. Teachers are not allowed to adjust.

3. There are rules about what teachers must put on classroom walls. If a federal inspector comes around and you don’t have the proper material on your classroom walls, a note goes in your permanent file.

4. The Reading First program requires that reading be taught before everything else. Some kids are relatively slow to learn to read but they are able to learn in other ways. The effect of the mandate is that these other kids sit in the classroom baffled and unhappy and lose self-confidence.

5. The rigidity of the curriculum — which must be exactly the same for all students — squashes encouragement. For example, suppose a student is interested in bugs. You could encourage reading by giving the student books about bugs. This is a natural, effective, and easy way to teach reading. This way of teaching is not just discouraged but prohibited.

6. A friend of mine says that bookstores should be divided into “real books” and “other books.” Children’s textbooks, which are worse than anything in a bookstore, deserve their own category. A fifth-grade teacher got around the awfulness of the textbooks by putting real books in the center of the classroom tables and having children sit with their textbooks open around them. This allowed the students to read the real books but if the principal came by the teacher would not get in trouble because the assigned textbooks were open in front of the students.

Excellent posts about elementary-school education by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok.

How to reduce flies? Here’s one way:

A Chinese city suburb has set a bounty on dead flies in a bid to promote public hygiene . . . Xigong, a district of Luoyang in the central province of Henan, paid out more than 1,000 yuan ($125) for about 2,000 dead flies on July 1, the day it launched the scheme with the aim of encouraging cleanliness in residential areas. . . An Internet user said that although the office had good intentions, the action itself had made the district a laughing stock.

“The key point is the government should encourage residents to clean up the environment so that no flies can live there, instead of spending money on dead flies,” the Internet user wrote.

Yes. This gets back to Erika Schwartz’s criticism of Gina Kolata and the NY Times for not mentioning prevention in an article about strokes. Kolata’s article accurately reflected the situation: far more interest in (i.e., money spent on) cure than prevention. It makes as much sense in America as it does in China.

Norman Temple and I wrote about a related problem: more support for high-tech than low-tech research, even though low-tech research has been more helpful. The low-tech research is more prevention-related.

More health-care absurdity.

“The flax seed oil scam” by a herbalist named Henriette says bad things about flaxseed oil. One is about (lack of) conversion of ALA (the short-chain omega-3 in flaxseed oil) to EPA and DHA (the long-chain omega-3s found in fish oil and presumably active in the brain):

The scam is in flax seed oil folks trying to maintain that we can convert ALA into EPA and DHA in anything like relevant amounts.

We can’t. We convert at most 10 %, but usually less than half that.

Which is “fairly common knowledge among nutritionists,” says Henriette. She quotes the abstracts of two scientific papers to support this point. The other criticism is that flaxseed oil goes bad quickly:

I dislike flax seed oil for another reason as well: it oxidizes (goes rancid) pretty much the minute it’s pressed, and unless it’s been refrigerated ALL the way from press to consumer, it’s ALWAYS rancid.

After I read this, I realized I was in an unusual position. When it comes to flaxseed oil, I don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. I have been able to measure the benefits by myself on myself. Apparently the conversion ratio, whatever it is, is high enough; and the suppliers of my flaxseed oil (I have used Spectrum Organic, Barlean’s, and the Whole Foods house brand) have solved the oxidation problem.

With almost every other nutrient, my knowledge is far less certain. Sure, I need some Vitamin C, but how much is best? Too much may cause cancer. I’ll probably never know the best amount for the average person, much less the best amount for myself.