In the comic strip "Zits" (8/31/01), Jeremy, the teenage character, slumps in his classroom chair and muses to himself as he adjusts his pose: "Half-lidded, cynical eyes, slack-jawed look of boredom - Okay, I'm ready. Teach me. I dare you."

As teachers, we have seen Jeremy's pose all too often.

What's his problem? It could be that Jeremy and millions of students like him simply aren't getting enough sleep. William C. Dement, a leading authority on sleep and head of Stanford's sleep disorder center, writes in The Promise
of Sleep that forty years of research has convinced him that sleep is the most important prerequisite to learning. "When students are sleeping sufficiently, they are alert, interested, and ready to soak up knowledge." (Complete references on sleep appear in the bibliography on the back page of this issue.)

Dement points out that entering freshmen have abundant information about nutrition and physical fitness but learn virtually nothing about the value of sleep. He found that 80% of the undergraduates at Stanford were "dangerously sleep deprived." The first casualty, he says, is motivation, the key to learning and creativity. Sleep deprivation also affects mood, concentration, memory, error rate, and other measures of cognitive performance, and is manifested by fatigue, irritability, difficulty studying, reduced productivity, and a tendency to make mistakes (does any of this ring a bell?).

His students "report again and again that learning doesn't seem so hard when their minds are no longer weighed down by a sleep debt." For example, after getting eight hours of sleep a night for two weeks, one student found that her "very dull" professor had miraculously become "much more interesting." This reminds me of the Chinese proverb, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."

Experiments suggest that sleep helps the brain form long-term memories and that interfering with sleep hinders that process. Sleep also affects the transfer of information between short-term and long-term memory. Robert Stickgold, of Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues find that when people learn a new skill, their performance does not improve unless they get more than six - and preferably eight - hours of sleep. And a good night's sleep continues to pay dividends. Well-rested students tested two days to a week after training could perform the new task even better, whereas other students showed no improvement. Without sufficient sleep, skills and factual information may not be properly encoded into the brain's memory circuits.

Stickgold notes that many college students suffer from what he calls "sleep bulimia," getting only three to five hours sleep a night during the week, then bingeing on sleep during weekends trying to catch up. But much of what students "learn" during a sleep-deprived week does not get well integrated into the brain's memory circuits. Worse still, binge sleeping resets their circadian clock so students can't get to sleep Sunday night. Researchers are also finding that sleep deprivation may harm immune and endocrine systems. Symptoms of these problems often are misdiagnosed as a virus, depression, stress, or the effects of changing metabolism.

In a survey of 1,000 adults reported recently by the National Sleep Foundation, young adults showed more signs of sleep deprivation than did other adults. When compared to adults age 30 and over, a significantly larger percentage of 18-to-29-year-olds reported getting up tired, getting less sleep than they did five years earlier, and driving while drowsy.

Incidentally, young drivers learn nothing about the dangers of driving drowsy, yet thousands die or kill others each year because they fall asleep at the wheel. People under the age of 25 represent 55% of drowsy driving fatalities. Research just published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention finds through simulations that being awake three hours past one's bedtime diminishes driving ability as much as being legally drunk.

Sleep seems to be the residual factor in balancing the competing demands for time - what's left over after other claims are settled. The problem of sleep deprivation among young people may not be new, but it seems to be getting worse. What's changed in the last few years is that the Internet, cable TV with hundreds of channels, part-time jobs, and the emergence of a 24/7 world have raised the opportunity cost of sleep. One college that monitored student online use found that demand peaked at midnight, and the computer crush of the week occurred Sunday at midnight. Caffeine may be the drug of choice in staying awake (Hellooo Starbucks! The number of coffee bars has more than quadrupled in the last decade).

In the fall of 1997, to address the problem of drowsy students, the starting time at the seven high schools in Minneapolis was changed from 7:15 a.m. to 8:40 a.m. Critics argued that students would simply stay up later. But researchers found that students were sleeping about an hour more and said they were no longer struggling to get out of bed in the morning. After the switch students behaved better in school, had better attendance, and showed fewer signs of depression.

There has been surprisingly little work by economists on this time allocation problem (for an exception, see the article by Daniel Hamermesh). Tiger Woods said that the best thing about leaving for the PGA tour after his second year at Stanford (where he was majoring in economics) is that he now gets enough sleep. More generally, I've noticed how tournament contenders, when interviewed on the eve of the final round, often talk about how much sleep they plan to get. The pros know about the value of sleep.

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I find I have had to give more make-up exams in my large principles class, and I think I know one reason why. E-mail. For decades I have asked students to try to notify me ahead of time if they can't make an exam. Before the ubiquity of e-mail, students would call or see me about missing an exam. This personal contact gave me an opportunity to ask questions. But students have unilaterally shifted to e-mail. E-mail is more antiseptic for them and does not risk any awkward questions from me. Sure, I can ask questions via e-mail too, but students can carefully compose any answer and can delay their response until after the exam.

Not only are more students missing my exams, but in my most recent large principles class, for the first time ever I needed to schedule a make-up after the original make-up. Some students who had already agreed to the original make-up's time and place, bailed at the last minute via e-mail. I couldn't believe it! Because this had never been a problem, I had no policy in place about missing a make-up. Has anyone else seen an increase in make-ups and if so, what are you doing about it?

Speaking of make-ups, Wilber McKeachie may be the Dean of college educators, but I disagree with his policy about missed exams. In the tenth and latest edition of his Teaching Tips (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), here's how he deals with them: "I simply use marks from the tests the student did take to determine the grade, counting the missed test neither for nor against the student." (p. 105). This approach would appear to invite opportunistic behavior by students and seems especially unfair to students who take exams as scheduled.

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From time to time, The Teaching Economist reports on the annual survey of incoming freshmen by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html). The results of 270,000 students from 434 colleges and universities have been statistically adjusted to represent the 1.1 million freshmen entering four-year colleges as first-time, full-time students in the Fall of 2000

Only 36% of entering college students report studying or doing homework six hours or more a week during the previous academic year. This is down from a high of 47% in 1987, when the question was first asked. Despite the drop in study time, grades continue to rise, with 43% of entering freshman earning an "A" average in high school, up from 36% in 1996 and a low of 17% in 1968. Those reporting a "C" average fell to 7% - down from 15% in 1996 and a high of 23% in 1968. So in 1968, "C" students outnumbered "A" students. Now "A" students outnumber "C" students 6 to 1.

What Grade inflation in high school has boosted grade expectations in college. The share of students who believe they have a "very good" chance of earning at least a "B" average rose from 52% in 1999 to 58% in 2000. That's a stunning jump in one year. When the question was first posed in 1971, only 27% expected at least a "B" average. A record 21% of freshmen also expect to graduate with honors, up from 18% in 1999 and from a low of only 4% in 1967.

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The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon have put the media on a recession watch. Most of those covering the economy have little training in economics. For example, Virginia Postrel, who writes an "Economic Scene" column in the New York Times has a B.A. in English. Any economist who has been interviewed by reporters soon realizes that most of the time goes toward basic education, and only after that groundwork is laid is a reporter in a position to add some value to the story. That's not surprising, or even troubling.

What may give us pause, however, is the background of some "economists" quoted in the media. I had dinner recently with an oft-quoted "economist" who works for a big international bank. He has a Ph.D., but in political science, not in economics. He says he doubled his salary by marketing himself as an economist. In my state of Connecticut, two "economists" frequently quoted in the state media have no formal economics education to speak of - neither majored in economics as an undergraduate and both have masters in public administration.

It's been my experience in discussing the economy with reporters that they do not like subtlety or ambiguity. Like Harry Truman, they want a one-armed economist. In this setting, perhaps the less an "economist" knows, the easier it is to tell an unambiguous story - often wrong but never in doubt. There could be a variant of Gresham's law at work here.

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Some teachers are always on the lookout for good fiction that comes with a dose of economics. Meet Burke Devore, an unemployed paper company manager and central character in Donald Westlake's novel The Ax (Warner Books, 1998). Frustrated from losing out time after time to more qualified applicants, Devore decides that his best chance of finding his ideal job is to eliminate the competition - literally. By anonymously advertising for a position like the one he seeks, he harvests resumes from job applicants, identifies those most likely to beat him out for the position, and then tries to kill them off one by one. You will have to read the book to find out how all this turns out, but it's rational self-interest at a different level, with a dose of labor economics. And the writing is terrific.

Norman R. Augustine, CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, and Kenneth L. Adelman, a syndicated columnist, explain in Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Learning and Succeeding on the Business Stage (Hyperion, 2001) how Shakespeare's knowledge of palace politics and strategic warfare can be applied to the corporate world through what they term "the five acts of business." But the book seems to be a bit of a stretch.

"Let everyone mind his own business, and the cows will be well tended."
- French proverb

"Buyers want a thousand eyes. Sellers only one."
- German proverb

"Custom is stronger than law."
- Russian proverb

"Custom without reason is but ancient error."
- English proverb

"If you ask me the right questions,
I know some good answers."
- " The Family Circus" by Bil Keane

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Matthew Rabin of UC Berkeley is the first John Bates Clark medal winner to openly embrace behavioral economics, an approach that incorporates elements of psychology into standard economic theory. Last year Rabin won a McArthur Foundation award, which comes with a $500,000 grant. His research has focused on the perception of fairness in markets, particularly labor markets. He is also interested in procrastination, though he hasn't yet gotten around to writing up those findings. Not true. In "Choice and Procrastination," Rabin and Ted O'Donahue argue that people procrastinate more in pursuing important goals than unimportant ones and that offering a non-procrastinator additional options can induce procrastination. PDF copies of his papers can be found at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/users/rabin. There you can also check out pictures of Rabin on what he calls "a good-hair day" and on "a bad-hair day." It's worth a click. A few years ago he compiled "An Incomplete List of (about 2000) Psychology and Economic Citations," which can be found at http://www.mit.edu/people/irons/rsage/rabib.html.

Robert Solow has been famously quoted as observing that we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics. A variant of that might be that we read about hi-tech teaching methods everywhere but seldom see them in the classroom. According to the latest survey by William Becker of Indiana University and Michael Watts of Purdue University, most undergraduate instructors in 2000 lectured, used the chalkboard, and assigned readings from a standard textbook. This picture is essentially unchanged from their 1995 survey. The median amount of time devoted to lecturing in all courses at all institutions was 83%. Textbooks were also used 83%of the time for assignments in all types of courses at all types of institutions. Overhead projectors were used 11 to 33% of the time in principles classes at research universities and two-year colleges, but were rarely used elsewhere. Except in statistics and econometrics courses, computer-generated displays were seldom used at any type of school. Becker and Watts summarize their findings in "Teaching Economics at the Start of the 21st Century: Still Chalk-and-Talk," American Economic Review, 90 (May 2001): 446-451.

How effective are newer teaching methods? David Hoaas of Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, sent me a copy of a paper in which he and colleague Elizabeth Rankin examine the impact of using PowerPoint slides on student performance, student attitudes toward economics, and student evaluations. The same instructor taught two one-semester introductory economics courses for two semesters. Each semester, one 35-person section was taught using an animated slide presentation generated by PowerPoint and the other 35-person section, serving as the control group, was taught using chalk and talk exclusively. So as not to introduce a self-selection bias, students had no prior information about the manner of instruction before they enrolled and were not allowed to switch classes. PowerPoint slides were developed by the instructor and reflected the notes used in the control group. To help explain graphs, the instructor supplemented PowerPoint with the chalkboard. The same textbook and same exams were used in each course. Exams were a mix of multiple choice and essay questions..

The bottom line is that, after accounting for a variety of other explanatory variables, using PowerPoint, with one exception, had no significant effect on student grades, student attitudes, or student evaluations of the instructor. The one significant difference was that, among those in the chalk-and-talk sections, significantly more students at the end of the semester said they "would be willing to attend a lecture by an economist" than had so indicated at the beginning of the semester. So the one significant finding seems to favor chalk and talk. Hoaas and Rankin speculate that PowerPoint might actually lower student performance to the extent that students believe material not presented on slides is not important enough, so they take notes only from the slides. And after students have copied the relevant material from the slides, they may turn off on the rest and be more bored since they do not feel they need to listen as attentively.

Incidentally, the PowerPoint class was offered at 8:20 a.m. and the chalk-and-talk class at 9:45 a.m. in the spring semester. So as not to introduce a time-of-day bias, class times were reversed the fall semester. In the student grade equation, a dummy variable for time of day suggested lower grades for the 8:20 class, though the difference was not significant. The Hoaas and Rankin paper, "Does the Use of Computer-Generated Slide Presentations in the Classroom Affect Student Performance and Interest?" was just published in the Eastern Economic Journal, 27 (Summer 2001): 355-366.

I haven't used PowerPoint, but I have briefly tried overhead transparencies. I found that the atmosphere changed when the first one went up. It's as if students went into a trance. A colleague who tried PowerPoint said his midterm grades were terrible, so he stopped. He thought it was because students didn't get a chance to see him drawing diagrams, so they couldn't figure out how to draw them.

The previous issue of "The Grapevine" published "Building an Economic Utopia: A Capstone Activity," by Richard Schiming of Minnesota State University, Mankato. He has a Web page that lists the specific activities for constructing a utopia. The site also includes his grading criteria. The address is http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~schimr/web/utopia.html.

Allen Prindle of Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, says he has begun referring to graphs as cartoons. Cartoons tell stories, serve as symbols or simplifications, and often "teach" a lesson. He notes that some students are afraid of graphs, but they relate more easily to cartoons.

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Invesco, the Denver based mutual funds company, will pay $60 million over 20 years for the right to call the new Denver Broncos's stadium Invesco Field at Mile High. Paying big bucks for such attention is nothing new. Most sports venues have high priced monikers. Denver also has Coors Field and the Pepsi Center. The man-bites-dog part of the story is that the local paper, the Denver Post, has said it will not use the name Invesco Field and instead will simply call the place Mile High stadium, the name of the Broncos's former stadium. If this becomes a trend, especially on TV broadcasts, the value of naming rights will crash. If only the Denver paper drops the name, Invesco may still get the attention it seeks even in Denver. It's like me telling you not to think about an elephant. Are you thinking about one? I told you not to. While you're at it, don't think about Invesco Field either.

Bulgari, the Italian jeweler, paid author Fay Weldon an undisclosed sum for the prominent placement of its jewelry in her new novel. This appears to be a first in the book industry. The agreement required that Weldon mention Bulgari at least a dozen times. She decided to make the jewelry the centerpiece of her book. She said she initially had qualms about the proposal, but then decided, "I don't care. Let my name be mud. They never give me the Booker prize anyway." Apparently she believed she did not have a vaunted literary reputation to protect. The Bulgari Connection was published in October by Flamingo Books.

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay apparently believed she did have a literary reputation to protect. When she worked as a foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair, a position she accepted after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she would not let the magazine use her real name. The magazine wanted to capitalize on her fame and offered her twice the pay to use her real name, but she continued to write under a pseudonym.

According to Harper's magazine, there were 332 entertainment award ceremonies held in 2000. Herbert Simon's words again come to mind: "When there is a wealth of information, there is a poverty of attention."
students.

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John J. Todd Arnedt, et al., "How Did Prolonged Wakefulness and Alcohol Compare in the Decrements They Produce on a Simulated Driving Task?" Accident Analysis and Prevention, 33 (March 2001): 337-44
Sandra Blakeslee, "For Better Learning, Researchers Endorse 'Sleep On It' Adage,"
The New York Times, March 7, 2000.
William C. Dement, The Promise of Sleep, (Delacorte Press, 1999).
William C. Dement, "Sleepless at Stanford," http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/sleepless.html.
Daniel Hamermesh, "Sleep and the Allocation of Time," Journal of Political Economy, 89 (October 1990).
National Sleep Foundation, "Less Fun, Less Sleep, More Work: An American Portrait," March 27, 2001, http://www.sleepfoundation.org/PressArchives/lessfun_lesssleep.html.
Werner Plihal and Jan Born, "Effects of Early and Late Nocturnal Sleep on Declarative and Procedural Memory," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9 (1997): 534-547.
Allie Shah, "Later School Start Equals More Sleep, Better Attendance, Study Finds," Star Tribune, August 20, 2001, www.startribune.com/.
Robert Stickgold, et al., "Sleep Induced Changes in Associative Memory," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 11 (1999): 182-193.
Robert Stickgold, et al., "Visual Discrimination Task Improvement: A Multi-Step Process Occurring During Sleep," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12 (2000): 246-254.

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