School Hours

Dear World,

School hours are beginning to have an affect on students; their lives, academic and social, as well as their mental and physical health, are being messed with, and it's having a negative impact. 

At any given age, a person's body naturally rests at different times. According to some research I did (see sources at the bottom of this blog), after reaching puberty, a person's body clock shifts two hours later. This means that if, say, I used to go to sleep at 9:00, now I won't be able to go to sleep until 11:00, although for most it can be closer to 12:00. Sleep cycles are around 90 minutes long, and it is difficult and possibly detrimental to your health (if done repeatedly) to wake up in the middle of one. Given that teenagers need 9-9.5 hours of sleep in a night to be able to fully function, this means that they should be waking up between the hours of 8:00 and 9:30. Doctors even say that a teenage brain cannot be expected to be fully functioning until 10:00 in the morning. However, this is where school hours enter the equation. 

Every high school I have ever heard of has started school between the hours of 7:00 and 8:15 (while elementary schools, which have students that generally wake up closer to the 6:00 hour, start as late as 9:00). That in itself is a huge problem. After all, according to the people who actually know these things (doctors), teenagers should not even be waking up until at the very earliest 8:00! That would have them at school at the very earliest 8:15, assuming that they all have access to a mode of transport that gets them to school within ten minutes, working in five minutes for getting up and dressed. But since breakfast is an absolute essential in order to "jumpstart your metabolism" (quote courtesy of my mother) and get you energized for the day, we have to work in 10-15 minutes for eating, which would bring us to around 8:30. Also, most teenagers take more than five minutes to get up, get dressed, and take care of personal hygiene. All this is assuming that the teenager went to bed at 11:00, which is the very earliest that specialists suggest they could. And if they missed the mark at all they would be waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle, meaning that it is harder to get up, and then they are more likely to be tired throughout the day. The fact is that most schools have earlier start times than 8:15, so this isn't looking very feasible! 

As if that weren't enough, we have to take a look at the other end of the school day as well. Most schools get out between the hours of 2:30 and 3:30. Since in the morning argument I used an example of 8:15, let's use an end time of 7 hours later, at 3:15. For a student that leaves directly after school lets out, and again has a mode of transportation that gets to and from school in 10 minutes, this gets them home at around 3:30. Their school day is not over then, oh no. Next comes their hours of homework. In many instances, each teacher is assigning what could be up to an hour of homework a night. If a student has five classes, that puts them at five hours of homework. Granted, not every teacher assigns a whole hour (although some *cough*math*cough* assign more).The average high school student gets approximately 3.5 hours of school work when all is said and done. 

That doesn't seem so bad, right? Wrong. Even if we continue to follow this student who has no extracurriculars whatsoever, and therefore always comes directly home after school (which, I might add, almost never happens for most students), their schedule is still packed. Let's say that after they get home at 3:30, they take fifteen minutes to have a small after school snack, since they most likely haven't eaten for three or four hours. That puts us at 3:45. If they sit down to their 3.5 hours of homework immediately after finishing their snack and don't take a single break the entire time, they will finish their homework at 7:15. Just in time for a late dinner. Then, they can have from around 8:15 until 11:00 to do any of their hobbies. Not bad, I suppose. Of course, you do have to take into account the fact that most students have all sorts of extracurriculars, or even just a social life, which often lead them to not even get home until 6:00 or 7:00. Then they have dinner, and after dinner (around 8:00) they can finally start on their 3.5 hours of homework, bringing us to 11:30, where they start the entire cycle over again.

At my school, we start on most days at 8:05, and I wake up at 7:00 to get there on time. However, since I can never sleep by 10:00, I often need to either wait until 11:30 to go to sleep, or wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle. Now, on Tuesdays we start at 8:45, which makes a remarkable difference, even though it's only a 40 minute change. I can swing sleeping until 8:00 on most Tuesdays, which leaves me with a much more achievable 11:00 bed time. I have found that on those later start days, I get moving faster in the mornings, and then once I'm up I feel more awake, both immediately in the morning and throughout the day. While late start as it is probably couldn't work permanently due to shortened class periods, I do believe that if they simply adjusted the schedule down 40 minutes every day, a start time of 8:45 would be beneficial to all. Honestly, I would be willing to give up the 3:00 hour to school if it meant school didn't start until 8:45.

The other problem I mentioned, that of too much homework, is one for another day, although I do promise that I will write about it at some point. I have this idea, though, that if students were to go to all their classes while their brains weren't messed up from terrible sleeping patterns, then it wouldn't take them as long to do their homework.

All in all, I would have to say that I think the entire institution of high school could be radically improved, if they would only bump school hours down an hour or two. 

Well, that's about it for now!

Don't Forget To Be Awesome,

Ilana

Sources:

http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/sleep/sleep_problems.html#

http://www.nationwidechildrens.org/sleep-in-adolescents

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/time_and_learning/2014/02/high_schools_assign_3.5_hours.html