IF there’s one thing that American high school teachers hate, it’s seeing students chew *gum in class. Well, they’d better take their nerve pills. A new study at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston has found that chewing gum might actually help students do better in math. The study was funded by the chewing gum maker Wrigley after customers wrote to say that chewing gum helped them focus. “For the first time, we’ve been able to show in a real-life situation that students did perform better when they were allowed to chew,” Gil Leveille, executive director of the Wrigley Science Institute, told Reuters.