Let Me Sleep
Even though changing the starting time of schools to later in the day could cost more money, the benefits of starting school later significantly outweigh the financial cost because it would improve public safety and academic performance, allow teens to acquire an adequate amount of sleep, and benefit teens’ health tremendously.
Public safety and academic performance are two things that would drastically improve if schools would delay the start times. In the 1930s, Nathaniel Kleitman, a very important person in sleep medicine, uncovered a daily routine speed and accuracy of intellectual activity. Even in people that got an adequate amount of sleep, their performance still showed a decrease at early times in the morning (“Sleep, …show more content…
Professionals say beginning high school at 7:30 a.m. is early enough in the morning to have a disastrous consequence on adolescents capability to involve themselves and pay attention (Blad). Teenagers’ capability to make good decisions, like going to sleep at a decent time at night is still progressing, and using smartphones can affect how a person sleeps as well (Blad). Another reason it’s difficult to get the right amount of sleep is because natural sleep cycles make it hard for adolescents to fall asleep before eleven o’clock p.m. (Blad). The normal sleep pattern of teens begins to change when they go through puberty (Caimey). More time to sleep and later times to awake are needed for teenagers, because of biological shifts in their teenage years. Requiring a teacher to wake up at 4:30 in the morning is the same as making a student awake at 7 in the morning (Blad). The AAP suggests that teens need to sleep for 8.5-9.5 hours per night. Pushing the start times of schools back to 8:30 or maybe even later would make it simpler to get as much sleep as adolescents need (Wheaton, Ferro, Croft 809). Just 14 percent of minors get the suggested 8.5-9.5 hours of rest per night, says the National Sleep Foundation. “. . . Students report getting less sleep than they need from about the age of 13 years” ( Onyper et al). A very large portion of students need to wake up at 6:30 to be at school on time, which means in order to get enough sleep, the teen would have to be asleep by 9 p.m. As a result of the circadian clock in teenagers’ brains, it’s almost not possible for adolescents to be asleep that early. The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, even thinks that schools should adopt later start times (Blad). With all of this evidence that schools start too early there are still very few schools that begin the school day after 8:30 a.m. “Forty-two states reported that 75%-100% of their public schools had
Even though changing the starting time of schools to later in the day could cost more money, the benefits of starting school later significantly outweigh the financial cost because it would improve public safety and academic performance, allow teens to acquire an adequate amount of sleep, and benefit teens’ health tremendously.
Public safety and academic performance are two things that would drastically improve if schools would delay the start times. In the 1930s, Nathaniel Kleitman, a very important person in sleep medicine, uncovered a daily routine speed and accuracy of intellectual activity. Even in people that got an adequate amount of sleep, their performance still showed a decrease at early times in the morning (“Sleep, …show more content…
Professionals say beginning high school at 7:30 a.m. is early enough in the morning to have a disastrous consequence on adolescents capability to involve themselves and pay attention (Blad). Teenagers’ capability to make good decisions, like going to sleep at a decent time at night is still progressing, and using smartphones can affect how a person sleeps as well (Blad). Another reason it’s difficult to get the right amount of sleep is because natural sleep cycles make it hard for adolescents to fall asleep before eleven o’clock p.m. (Blad). The normal sleep pattern of teens begins to change when they go through puberty (Caimey). More time to sleep and later times to awake are needed for teenagers, because of biological shifts in their teenage years. Requiring a teacher to wake up at 4:30 in the morning is the same as making a student awake at 7 in the morning (Blad). The AAP suggests that teens need to sleep for 8.5-9.5 hours per night. Pushing the start times of schools back to 8:30 or maybe even later would make it simpler to get as much sleep as adolescents need (Wheaton, Ferro, Croft 809). Just 14 percent of minors get the suggested 8.5-9.5 hours of rest per night, says the National Sleep Foundation. “. . . Students report getting less sleep than they need from about the age of 13 years” ( Onyper et al). A very large portion of students need to wake up at 6:30 to be at school on time, which means in order to get enough sleep, the teen would have to be asleep by 9 p.m. As a result of the circadian clock in teenagers’ brains, it’s almost not possible for adolescents to be asleep that early. The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, even thinks that schools should adopt later start times (Blad). With all of this evidence that schools start too early there are still very few schools that begin the school day after 8:30 a.m. “Forty-two states reported that 75%-100% of their public schools had