Formal Paper #3- Final Draft

Sleep for Education

Everyday across the country, millions of young students wake up around sunrise and begin the tedious task of getting through their morning routine in order to get to class on time. Some of these students are early risers and take well to the task while others struggle just to get out of bed. Attention span is key to being able to digest the information overload that students from kindergarten through high school face every day. Matthew Shulman from the U.S. News & World Report website, citing a study about the effects of REM sleep, wrote, “Researchers at the University of Montreal report that a study of young children showed that those who slept significantly fewer hours than the recommended 10 were more hyperactive and impulsive than those who got plenty of shuteye and scored lower on two cognitive skills tests.” The study implies that students who sleep less will be more likely to act up in class, and teachers will have a much more difficult time teaching these students. Studies like this one and an abundance of others show that lack of sleep not only causes learning problems but can also lead to serious health issues. A change to the school system from such an early morning rise to a 10 a.m. start could dramatically improve learning capabilities of our children and could lead to a more productive and healthy population.

There are many arguments for why a 10 a.m. start would not work. Many will say that it would require parents adjusting their work schedules so they can accommodate the new standard. It would also require, in some cases, a change in day care and babysitting situations. Another argument might be that it would be unfair to teachers who have grown accustomed to the 7-to-4 schedule they’ve had for 100 years. It might also be assumed that a 10 a.m. start would lead to a 5 p.m. finish, which would wreak havoc on parents’ work schedules.

All these and other arguments and reasons for why not to have a 10 a.m. start overlook one important fact: it’s not about the teachers or the parents, it’s about the students. If the point of education is indeed to educate and not to babysit, the rationale for changing to a 10 a.m. start would be obvious: Students who get more sleep will be more engaged and less disruptive, and, in most cases, more eager to learn. With students more awake and engaged from the time they start class, their ability to learn and concentrate on the subject matter would increase, causing a decrease in the amount of time required to have class. Following this logic, changing the school day from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. to one that starts at 10 a.m. and ends at, say, 3 p.m. would result in a more productive school day with less time required of the students and teachers.

Mothers all over the country are practically pulling their hair out attempting to get their kids to wake up each and every school day. It’s extremely stressful for parents, especially the ones who have to be at work bright and early, to have to worry that if their child misses another day of class that they will get a call from the truant officer. Even if the parents succeed in getting their kids to school, they have to worry that their sleep-deprived and exhausted children might cause a stir in class or sneak off campus once they arrive.  

In the movie Chalk, Mr. Lowrey had a hard time controlling his students. They were disruptive, did not respect him, and seemed, overall, uninterested in anything he had to say. He of course was a new teacher and eventually was able to figure out how to get through to them; but should it really have been so hard that it took the whole school year to get to anything that resembled a cooperative class? It was such a bad experience for Mr. Lowrey that even after accomplishing the great feat of learning to be, from all appearances in the film, the best teacher in the school, he seriously doubted his resolve to continue to teach. Of course, he needed to learn to be a quality teacher; that being said, he would have most likely been able to reach his stride a lot sooner if he already had a willing and cooperative class.  The students in his class would have been much less a nuisance if they were accustomed to a proper sleep routine that would include a later start time.

Many articles are written about teaching methods to open the minds of students and help them unleash their creativity.  Many of these writings propose worthwhile methods to help students become successful. Examples of these include bell hooks, John Gatto, and Mike Rose, whose writings offer inspiring proposals for changes to the school system to encourage critical thinking. In his article “Against School” on wesjones.com, John Gatto writes, “Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades?” Isn’t it possible that both the boredom the teachers feel and the rudeness the teachers see in their students that Gatto points out in the quote above might be alleviated by adjusting the start time of the school day?

In an article on the Washington Post website about education resolutions for the New Year, Mike Rose proposes as a resolution “to have more young people get an engaging and challenging education.” That was his number-one education resolution. It would be easier to give well-rested students a more engaging and challenging education than it would a group of half-awake, brain-dead troublemakers. In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Ken Robinson, an expert on critical thinking, writes, “Those students whose minds work differently—and we’re talking about many students here; perhaps even the majority of them—can feel alienated from the whole culture of education” (39). To add to that statement, students’ minds also operate differently with varying levels of sleep.  

A quick search on Google for “effects of sleep deprivation” pulls up many negative articles related to mental and physical health issues. Camille Peri writes in a WebMd.com article, “First, it impairs attention, alertness, concentration, reasoning, and problem solving. This makes it more difficult to learn efficiently. Second, during the night, various sleep cycles play a role in ‘consolidating’ memories in the mind. If you don’t get enough sleep, you won’t be able to remember what you learned and experienced during the day.”  The article goes on to explain that serious health problems can arise from a lack of sleep over time. These health risks include heart disease, heart failure, stroke, high blood pressure and so on. It did not say the age group of the study but presumably this study was based on adults. If that is true, and it is dangerous for adults to get inadequate sleep, how dangerous is it for children—who require even more sleep than adults— to have less sleep for 10 – 13 years before officially becoming adults?

Andrew Ward, an expert on the brain, was quoted on the Stone Hearth News website as saying, “Sleepiness disrupts the coordinated activity of an important network of brain regions; the impaired function of this network is also implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.” The brain is the most valuable organ that human beings have. Without it, we never would have discovered fire, put a man on the moon, or saved millions lives with innovations in medical technology. Why would we want to risk the health of children’s brains and their bodies by depriving them of the simplest form of preventive health care: adequate sleep?

The end result of switching to a 10 a.m. start time for schools grades K-12 would be to dramatically increase productivity amongst students as well as teachers. The overall health of the U.S. population would be improved in future generations, and perhaps mankind would see a new wave of discoveries by human beings using fully rested and functional brains. Teachers and parents would be less stressed out as they will be dealing with less hyperactive kids who are more eager to accomplish goals and to learn. The research has been done. The answer is obvious. All that’s left is for action to take place with a very simple change that could alter the lives of millions for the better and create a society of overachievers.

Works Cited

Shulman, Matthew. “Kids and Sleep: Why They Need More.” U.S. News & World Report. U.S. News & World Report LP. Web. 6 Sep. 2007

Chalk. Dir. Mike Akel. Perf.  Troy Schremmer, Janelle Schremmer, Shannon Haragan. Virgil Films, 2006. Film.  

Gatto, John. “Against School.” Harper's Magazine. Harper's Magazine Foundation. Wesjones.com. Web. Sep. 2003

Rose, Mike. “Mike Rose’s Resolution on Education.” The Washington Post. The Washington Post Company. Web. 1 May. 2011

Robinson, Ken. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Peri, Camille. “Coping With Excessive Sleepiness.” WebMD. WebMD, LLC. Web. 14 Sep. 2012

Ward, Andrew. “How sleep deprivation impacts dementia, different types of memory, and learning.” Stone Hearth News. Web. 16 Oct. 2012