Sleep Deprivation

1 Pages 358 Words

Without enough sleep, I am completely worthless. I am unable to function. The same is true with most of my friends. If the Board of Education were to start school even a half an hour earlier, they are most nearly saying that they don’t care about students’ performances.

Most people think, that after someone has hit puberty, he/she will need less sleep than before they hit puberty, as most people think. Mary A. Carskadon says that most teenagers prefer to stay up late at night and sleep later in the morning. You might call this laziness, but Carskadon says it’s not a matter of choice, it’s a biological change their body is going through. She calls this a ”delayed phase preference”. The transition from middle school to high school is already difficult for teenagers because high school starts up to one hour earlier. And if the Board of Education decided to start school even earlier, this could dramatically reduce students’ performance. Carskadon did a study with 15 students who just made the transition from middle school to high school. Middle school started at 8:25 a.m. High school students had to be at school at 7:20. The average time it took for the students to fall asleep went from 9.5 minutes to 8.4 minutes. One student fell asleep in 1.8 minutes. One student even went right into REM sleep, usually the last stage of sleep. Someone who falls into REM sleep that easily is sleep deprived.

Sleep deprivation directly affects students’ performance. Students who were earning A’s in school were getting up to 35 to 45 more minutes of sleep per night. During the weekend, students don’t have to get up for school. The students earning D’s/F’s were sleeping longer than the students earning A’s. This shows that the students earning D’s/F’s are more sleep deprived.
Now that you have seen the statistics and heard the facts I would like you to reconsider your proposition of opening school one hour earlier. Sleep is...