Mo Ibrahim, a friend of mine, teaches high school in New York with hard-to-teach students. He and I want to find out if my ideas about teaching can help him. His blog posts here are the story of that.

I moved to New York in the summer of 2004 to start the Teaching Fellows summer training program at City College of New York. My wife and kids stayed in Chicago until I could find an apartment.

I found an apartment through a Teaching Fellows message board. It was in a nice section of The Bronx, but I only had three months before I had to find another apartment. I spent the first two months taking Master’s degree classes at City College and studying for two teacher certification exams — a general exam that all aspiring teachers took and a specialized one for students who majored in special education. There was a lot of pressure to pass the exams, because if you failed you would be expelled from the program.

By the end of the summer, I had passed both exams, gotten a provisional certification to teach, and gotten a job teaching at a high school near Columbus Circle that served underprivileged students. Most of the students were poor and performed far below grade level in reading and math. But I didn’t have a place to live anymore, because my lease was up and the landlord refused to renew it. I applied for a number of apartments all over New York City, but all of my applications were denied. Once I called to make an appointment to visit an apartment and the owner asked me to come over immediately, but when he saw me he said the apartment was no longer available. On another occasion, I was told that the apartment was no longer available after I faxed over a copy of my driver’s license. I assumed all this was because I was black but an elderly Jewish lady said it was due to my Islamic name. So I moved into a hostel in the East Village. By September, I was teaching full time during the day and taking classes at City College at night. Due to the hostel’s two-week limit, I moved to a different hostel in Manhattan every two weeks.

A couple of things struck me when I starting teaching. One was the New York slang. I found myself frequently asking students to translate words and phrases they used. For example, “Yo, it’s mad brick in this class!” meant “It’s very cold in this class!” I was also struck by their apathy. Most of the students appeared to care little about completing class assignments, turning in homework, and studying for quizzes and exams. I would say, “Why didn’t you do your homework?” They would respond, “What’s the big deal? It’s just homework.” Their measure of success was “Did I pass?” Not all of them were like this, but most of them were.

The first subject I was assigned to teach was 11th and 12th grade math — the two grades were mixed in one class. I had diligently reviewed my high school and college math over the summer, so I was confident I knew the subject. I was assigned to co-teach this class with a veteran teacher. By then he’d been teaching at least fourteen years.

I had gone to a professional development workshop for co-teachers. It had taught seven different co-teaching methods. For example, one was “you teach one day, I teach the next day” or “you teach the first half, I teach the second half”. Different ways of sharing the teaching. In fact, not only did I not teach a single lesson, but I was relegated to the back of the classroom. My co-teacher was really nice otherwise, but he would not let me teach the class. I don’t really know why. When the students were allotted time to work on math problems I would rush to the special education students (students with a learning disability or who were emotionally disturbed, e.g., anger management problems) to give them one-on-one help, but they were usually resistant. They stared at me blankly, or asked off-topic questions like, “Did you see the Yankees game last night?”

Occasionally, students, including non-special education students, would ask me for help. But often in the middle of my explanation the whole-class discussion would resume, and I would have to stop teaching, because my co-teacher asked me not to talk to students while he was teaching. That was my role during my first semester of teaching. I wasn’t despondent, though, because I considered it a blessing in disguise. Since my co-teacher kept me from teaching, I didn’t have to prepare any lessons. He didn’t even allow me to grade any papers, which was a good thing since I was in night school and still living in hostels.

Things changed drastically after the first semester. A veteran English teacher took an emergency leave of absence and I was given her English classes. My math co-teacher asked that all the poor performing special education students be given their own class to be taught by me. A young and friendly English teacher lent me her English curriculum and I developed a modified math curriculum based on the class where I sat in the back. And I was finally able to leave the hostels. I moved into a shared apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where Mike Tyson grew up. It took an hour and twenty minutes on the subway to get to work. During my first commute to work, I overheard someone say: “Did you know Brownsville’s the worst neighborhood in New York?” I hadn’t known that.

I speculated that bedtime honey improves sleep because it consists of an equal mix of glucose and fructose. Glucose is used by the brain during the first half of the night. By the second half, the fructose has been converted to glucose. However, honey has other ingredients, so it is not obvious that fructose and glucose are responsible. I focused on them partly because a need for glucose and fructose during sleep would explain (in evolutionary terms) why we eat dessert after meals, a puzzling separation.

Other carbohydrates also increase blood glucose. Do other carbs also improve sleep? Stuart King (who told me how much bedtime honey improved his sleep) pointed me to a 2010 discussion on a body-building forum. One person wrote:

I save a good portion of my carb intake for my last meal as I’ve found I sleep better afterwards. The worst nights of sleep I’d have during my prep were during my low carb days. Brutal.

Which supports the idea that blood glucose is running down, with bad consequences, during sleep. Even more telling was what someone else said:

Why does this happen to me? Before I was eating 2 cups of milk and a banana right before bed and would sleep fine. In the past few days I’ve tried to switch to 1 cup cottage cheese and 2 tbsp natty peanut butter. I’ve figured out this is why these past few nights I’ve had much more trouble sleeping and have had to resort to taking more OTC sleep aids. Then I’ll still wake up in middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep so I end up having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a cup of milk and 20 min later fall back asleep and sleep fine through the rest of the night.

Bedtime Snack A (2 cups of milk, banana): Good sleep. Bedtime Snack B (1 cup cottage cheese, 2 T peanut butter): bad sleep. There are hundreds of differences between the two snacks but one is that A, because of the banana, has about 6 g glucose and 6 g fructose (plus 3 g sucrose) and B has neither glucose nor fructose (nor sucrose). Stuart and I and several others have found that one tablespoon of honey (20 g) at bedtime greatly improves sleep. That much honey has about 8 g glucose and 8 g fructose. This is excellent evidence that it is the glucose and fructose in bedtime honey that improve sleep. Further evidence is that a snack with lots of sucrose (jelly) also produces good sleep.

More about bedtime honey and sleep.

• gut bacteria improve response to cancer chemotherapy
• lifespan depends on season of birth. Does more sunshine during pregnancy produce children who live longer?
• Trouble in the Berkeley anthropology department. One professor said, “It’s not true we feud. We don’t talk to each other.”
• How do people live without laptop keyboard covers?

Thanks to Casey Manion and Richard Sprague.

When I moved back to Berkeley from Beijing last spring, I noticed that my sleep was worse in Berkeley, months after arrival. I woke up less rested than in Beijing. There was no obvious explanation. My life was similar in the two places, especially on dimensions that influence sleep. I had expected my health to be better in Berkeley than Beijing because of Beijing pollution.

Wondering why my sleep was different, I realized my Beijing bedroom was probably darker than my Berkeley bedroom. In Beijing I live in an apartment complex and cover most of my bedroom windows to block outside light and for privacy. In Berkeley, I live in a house. My bedroom window looks out over an enclosed backyard. That my Berkeley bedroom might not be dark enough had never occurred to me. It was fairly dark — no street light, no alley light, no light from neighbors.

Did the (likely) difference in darkness contribute to the difference in sleep? I tested this possibility by making my Berkeley bedroom much darker. Later I made it lighter, then darker again (an ABAB design). I measured sleep quality by rating how rested I felt when I woke up on a 0-100 percentage scale where I estimated how rested I felt compared to completely rested (= 100%). I have used this scale for many years. Here are the results:

To my surprise, when I made my bedroom darker my sleep improved. It got worse when I returned my bedroom to its original darkness. It improved again when I again made it darker. Until I graphed the data, I hadn’t realized that my baseline ratings probably shifted shortly before I made my bedroom darker. (I kept a paper record of my sleep, which made it hard to graph the data. Failure to notice this baseline shift was the last straw….I have gone paperless.) In spite of the baseline problem, the data are convincing that even at low intensities, light intensity mattered.

Depth of sleep (controlled by the amplitude of a circadian rhythm) is surely controlled by the amplitude of the light/dark rhythm. Below a certain threshold of light intensity, however, reducing light at night won’t make a difference. These observations implied that the threshold was lower than I’d thought. Support for the idea that the threshold is low — lower than other people realize, too — comes from a study published last summer after my experiment. Researchers reanalyzed old data to see if there was a correlation between lunar phase and sleep quality. Their subjects had slept in a windowless laboratory room. Nevertheless, sleep was worse during a full moon. One researcher was baffled. “What I can’t get my head around is, what would that cue be?” he said. In other words, how could the phase of the moon influence sleep? I’m not puzzled. The subjects spent only a few nights in the sleep lab. I believe there was carryover from when subjects slept at home, in rooms open to moonlight. Light from a full moon reduced the amplitude of sleep. This affected sleep later in the lab for the same reason jet lag lasts several days.

Is your bedroom dark enough? The light at night in Person X’s bedroom will differ in many ways from the light at night in someone else’s bedroom so a one-size-fits-all rule (your bedroom should be darker than . . . ) makes little sense. What does make sense is personal science: measure your sleep and test different levels of darkness.

• No correlation between omega-3 levels and cognitive function. I found strong effects of flaxseed oil (high in omega-3) in experiments, so this finding doesn’t worry me. Maybe the measures of cognitive function in this study depended on too many things they didn’t measure or control.
• Does methanol cause multiple sclerosis? Woodrow Monte makes a good case. “In the 1940s, . . . the National Multiple Sclerosis Society found the incidence of the disease to be virtually equally distributed between the sexes. . . . The real sea change in the incidence of MS in women did not come until after the introduction of a brand new methanol source . . . a can of diet soda sweetened with aspartame has up to four times the amount of methanol as a can of green beans. . . . At the 59th annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Boston on April 26, 2007
• Honey in human evolution. “Upper Paleolithic (8,000 – 40,000 years ago) rock art from all around the world depicts early humans collecting honey. . . . .The Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania list honey as their number one preferred food item.”
• What one climate scientist really thinks about Michael Mann. “MBH98 [Mann et al.] was not an example of someone using a technique with flaws and then as he [Mann] learned better techniques he moved on… He fought like a dog to discredit and argue with those on the other side that his method was not flawed. And in the end he never admitted that the entire method was a mistake. Saying “I was wrong but when done right it gives close to the same answer” is no excuse. He never even said that . . . They used a brand new statistical technique that they made up and that there was no rationalization in the literature for using it. They got results which were against the traditional scientific communities view on the matters and instead of re-evaluating and checking whether the traditional statistics were [still] valid [in this unusual case] (which they weren’t), they went on and produced another one a year later. They then let this HS [hockey stick] be used in every way possible . . . despite knowing the stats behind it weren’t rock solid.” Smart people still fail to grasp the weakness of the evidence. Elon Musk, the engineer, recently blogged, responding to Tesla fires, that Tesla development must happen as fast as possible because if delayed “it will . . . increase the risk of global climate change.”

Thanks to Dave Lull, Stuart King and Joe Nemetz.

When I started eating honey at bedtime to improve my sleep, my fasting blood sugar values suddenly improved. Alternate-day fasting had pushed them into the mid-80s; now they were often in the high 70s, values I had never seen before. Without long walks and alternate-day fasting, my fasting blood sugar values would have been more than 100, which is pre-diabetic.

This made me wonder: Does bad sleep cause diabetes? Plenty of evidence, I found, supports this idea. Here is one example:

Just three consecutive nights of inadequate sleep can elevate a person’s risk [of diabetes] to a degree roughly equivalent to gaining 20 to 30 pounds, according to a 2007 study at the University of Chicago. . . .This revelation backs up previous research from Yale and the New England Research Institutes, which showed that people who clock six hours or less of sleep a night are twice as likely to develop diabetes in their lifetime as those who snooze seven hours.

Here is another:

In the study, published in the October issue of the Journal SLEEP, short sleepers reported a higher prevalence of coronary heart disease, stroke and diabetes, in addition to obesity and frequent mental distress, compared with optimal sleepers who reported sleeping seven to nine hours on average in a 24-hour period. The same was true for long sleepers, and the associations with coronary heart disease, stroke and diabetes were even more pronounced with more sleep.

Maybe there is something to it.

I recently posted that an Oakland woman found that wearing orange glasses (which block blue light) in the evening greatly improved her sleep, which had been bad for decades. My post underestimated the improvement. Before she started wearing the glasses, it took her 2-4 hours to fall asleep. After she started wearing the glasses, it took 15-30 minutes. She wears the glasses from 8 to 10 pm. After that she goes to bed and tries to fall asleep.

I was very impressed by her story and started wearing orange glasses starting at 8 pm, even under incandescent light. Previously I only used them when looking at a computer screen in the evening. I’m not sure if wearing them more improves my sleep, but if I had to guess I’d say it does.

On a recent episode of Grumpy Old Geeks, a podcast by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, Jason told what happened when he had honey at bedtime (starts at 1:04:20):

JASON Tim Ferriss posted this . . . I did the experiment. I’ve been doing it for about six days now. Um, yeah, a thousand percent.

BRIAN Really? It’s really helped?

JASON One. Thousand. Percent. I sleep through the night. . . . I can quantifiably tell you that in the morning I am sharper, I get more work done, I am better rested, and I feel a thousand percent better. I’m going with the formula in the article, which is a cup of hot water, mixed with 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and 1 tablespoon of honey. It’s tasty, it’s really tasty, you wouldn’t think vinegar and honey would be great but it almost tastes like an apple cider.

BRIAN That doesn’t sound very appetizing to me, but I’ll trust you that it wasn’t bad.

JASON I found it delicious. And, plus, the hot liquid just before I went to bed, just knocked me out. I fell asleep immediately. . . . I’ve always had problems waking up five or six times in the middle of the night. I have slept through the night ever since I started this. I wake up in the morning ready to go.

BRIAN Excellent.

JASON This is one of the best sleep tips I’ve ever found. . . . The last couple nights I didn’t really have the time, ’cause I was getting kinda tired and I’m just like, you know what, I popped the lid on the honey and poured it down my throat and that feels like 1 tablespoon or 3, whatever. Same effect. . . . I have a tablespoon of honey right before I go to bed. Man, it has really improved how I sleep. Not even that, it’s how I greet the day. I greet the day really just ready to go. I’m a horrible morning person. I hate mornings.

BRIAN [laughs]

JASON If you have problems sleeping, definitely give this a try. Even if you don’t have trouble sleeping. I think it will improve how your body solidifies memory and does muscle rebuilding. They [= Seth and Stuart King] talk about strength improvements and it’s true. It’s ridiculously true. That’s when your muscles heal. . . . . It’s a crazy good tip. So hats off to Tim for passing that one along and I highly recommend it.

BRIAN I don’t have sleep issues . . . but I think I’ll give this a shot anyways and see if I get any of the other benefits.

JASON Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Even if you don’t have sleep problems, it will still help your brain like, hardcode memories. I’ve found that my memory has really improved. Especially with this project that I’m working on. Before I would wake up and it would take me an hour to get back to where I was . . . [Now] I come back down in the morning and I come back exactly where I was, ready to rock.

BRIAN Awesome. . . . I will definitely try it out.

Lots of research says better sleep = better memory.