By fiftyfive
fiftyfive.usu@gmail.com
Students don't get enough sleep. Most studies suggest that students in US high schools , on average, between 6 and 7 hours of sleep a night. The recommended amount of sleep for teenagers is 8.5 to 9 hours. With the National Sleep Foundation pinning the average number of hours of sleep per night at 6.8, the simple fact is, most students aren't getting enough sleep. Sleep deprivation can affect performance in many areas, including test scores, the ability to focus, the ability to drive, and obviously the ability to stay awake in class. This issue represents not only a danger to one's health, but also to public safety, and will affect students' academic records.
Many people would blame personal lifestyle choices for the disparity between the average amount of sleep and the necessary amount of sleep. There is, however, scientific evidence that school schedules are specifically antagonistic to the natural sleep cycle of most teenagers. It all relates to circadian rhythms; these are the rhythms that govern our sleeping patterns, and they follow roughly a 24 hour cycle that's often affected both by previous sleeping patterns and light sensitivity. The effect of light sensitivity on circadian rhythms reveals that teenagers would naturally be going to bed around 11 PM, which can't fit into an eight hour sleeping schedule if you have to be up by 6 AM to get ready for school. It's simple: waking up at 6 AM is unnatural for teenagers, and leads to teenagers getting less sleep than they ought to be.
The simplest evidence for this is much more obvious: during the summer, when school isn't around, most teenagers get much more sleep than they get during the school year. The same is true of weekends. If lifestyles, and not school schedules, were responsible for loss of sleep, then you'd expect to see the opposite: inhibitory effects of school schedules on personal lifestyle choices disappear in the summer and on weekends, so teenagers would be getting less sleep as opposed to more.
Of course, you may be saying just now, "so what? Why does any of this matter at all?" First off, screw you. Second off, it has effects on many areas of your life. Sleep loss is correlated with increased aging, depression, headaches, weight gain, increased blood pressure, irritability, blurred vision, disorientation, ADHD symptoms, and in extreme cases, hallucinations and psychosis. None of these are fun things to deal with. Sleep deprivation also causes traffic accidents; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will tell you that over 100,000 accidents a year are caused by fatigue and drowsiness, and it's been shown that losing two hours of sleep a night for a week can have similar effects on your ability to drive as alcohol. If you have thousands of drowsy students driving into school every day, you're clearly going to have problems with accidents, and that's a safety issue more than anything else. That combined with the other effects listed above ought to be enough to convince you that this sleep deprivation bit is nasty business.
It also has effects on academic ability. The University of Minnesota did a comparative study between students who went to schools starting at 7:15 vs. those that started at 8:30, and they found that on average, schools beginning at 8:30 had higher average GPAs, and students that got more sleep. Sleepy students have also do worst on standardized testing (this part's important, Administration!) such as the SATs, ACTs, and of course the infamous CSAPs. As Dr. James B. Maas, Cornell University psychologist, and a leading sleep expert has said, "Almost all teenagers, as they reach puberty, become walking zombies because they are getting far too little sleep." How can zombies compete academically if they're too busy hunting for brains to eat instead of using their own? Since standardized testing now helps determines a school's annual budget, you'd think that schools would have a vested economic interest in keeping their schedules comfortable for teen sleeping cycles, right?
Wrong. It all has to do with busing schedules. They have to provide enough transportation to get around 4,000 students to school every day, and that's only for Creek. The district has to provide enough busing for the middle schools, and the other high schools of the district, as well as many elementary schools. If high schools and elementary schools started at the same time, the district would have to double up on buses, as well as drivers, and if they tried to switch the elementary schools to starting at 7:20, the district would have to deal with a shitload of angry soccer moms. Obviously, your health is less important than the corresponding increase in tax dollars and the extreme bitchiness that shit-loads of soccer moms can bring.
So what's the solution? Isn't it obvious by now!? You should be sleeping in class. Yes, that's right, sleeping in class is the solution to your sleep deprivation problems. One in four students nationwide admitted to sleeping in class at least once a week, and in my opinion, that isn't nearly enough. As a student, you have no power to affect administrative decisions and duties, and your parents will think you're a lazy, pathetic piece of crap if you say you need to be getting more sleep, so they won't attempt to use their meager political associations to try to change things in your favor. Sleeping in class is the only rational solution, and honestly, is it really a better usage of your time to learn useless trivialities relating to Euclidean geometry, or a boring physics lecture, or some odd stuff about the Romantic period in literature and William Wordsworth? Sleep is a basic biological necessity; you need it to live. That puts it well above all of the boring lectures you'd be missing, and if you organize your sleeping patterns in school well, there's always your geeky friend that took notes instead of napping, so you're still set. So sleep in class, for your own good and the good of our standardized test scores.
