I 100% approve of chewing gum in school. Perhaps not in elementary school or middle school, but in high school it is certainly a good idea. In middle school and elementary school there was always the issues of getting gum on the floor and having it ground into the carpet, but in many high schools the floors aren’t carpet. Not to mention most students won’t spit gum on the ground. But in high school chewing gum has actually been proven to help students do better in class.
For starters, it has been scientifically proven that when you chew gum, for the first twenty minutes after you start chewing your brain is more receptive and attentive. For some reason chewing gum helps your brain focus more. If you’re taking a test and as you get to the hardest part start to feel your brain lagging, then pop in a piece. It should help you focus more and get back into your test taking groove.
It has also been proven that if you chew the same flavor gum or suck on the same flavor breath mint when you do homework, class work, and study and when you take the test on the same material it will help you remember the information better. It is called conditional learning. Something in the repetitive flavor and mouth movement triggers something in your brain to both help you learn and remember better.
If you have a test first block, many people say that chewing mint gum or sucking on a mint candy will help you wake up faster. In my fifth grade math class the teacher would often give us mint candies when we took our tests because we had her first period. She thought that the mint helped waken us and help us focus better on our tests. This hasn’t been proven like the chewing gum has, but it certainly did seem easier to take a test first block with the stimulating mint flavor in my mouth than it did without it there.
Because of this I feel that not only should gum chewing be allowed in schools, it should be encouraged. In the tests and studies done, those who chewed gum, whether just during the test or while they studied as well, got scores anywhere from three to ten percent higher than those who didn’t chew gum. So schools, perhaps think twice before you make your students spit out there gum, perhaps even hand out a piece or two as a reward.