As a career student, there have been many instances where I’ve been forced to question the value of seemingly asinine academic tasks. In order to coerce headstrong scholars such as myself into doing things they see no merit in doing, teachers will frequently use the excuse, “You’ll need to be able to do this in the future.” However, this rarely proves to be true.
Take Cornell notes, for example. I have never once used Cornell notes during my entire high school career, despite practicing them in every single social studies class throughout middle school. Similarly, rationalizing your denominators was regarded as an imperative step in earlier math classes (it’s literally just getting the same answer in a different form), but it hasn’t come up once in BC Calculus. Like the million and one other things I could mention right now, the same goes for waking up early.
The argument that early school start times benefit adolescents who will one day enter the workforce does not track. While the norm for day jobs in the United States is to begin at 9 a.m., according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average public high school start time in Missouri is 7:53 a.m. That is a 77-minute disparity between when students are expected to be at school, versus when they will be expected to be at their jobs.
At schools like Clayton, where high academic rigor is an unspoken expectation, the majority of students arrive at school another 23 minutes before the state average start time at least once a week to attend club meetings, zero-hour classes and teacher office hours. Citing myself as an example, there are some weeks when I am expected to be at school at 7:30 a.m. on at least three different days for extracurricular obligations, including the required, bi-weekly Globe editors’ meetings.
The fact that society expects teenagers to routinely wake up over an hour earlier than their parents violates human biology. For the past few years, Clayton High School’s Health and Physical Education Department Chair Sarah Gietschier-Hartman has taught a sophom*ore health unit centered around sleep.
“The big thing that sets teenagers apart from other age groups isn’t necessarily the amount of sleep that they need, but the time at which their bodies are physically ready to go to sleep,” Gietschier-Hartman said. “Teenagers are wired to go to sleep late and wake up late because it is the biological way in which our bodies teach us how to be independent.”
To understand why this phenomenon occurs, scientists have proposed the sentinel hypothesis. An article published in the National Library of Medicine explains that animals who travel in groups possess biological sleep mechanisms to ensure that at any given time, there will always be members of the group who are awake to protect those who are sleeping. This way, traveling in family groups composed of a variety of ages provides a form of protection against the dangers of stagnancy. The sentinel hypothesis essentially posits that natural human sleep schedules in modern populations reflect a long, prehistoric legacy of natural selection.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 73% of high school students do not get enough sleep. While this startling figure may not be entirely attributable to school work and school schedules, I have difficulty believing that later school start times would worsen the student sleep crisis. Furthermore, by the time my peers and I reach adulthood and have jobs, not only will the majority of said jobs begin over an hour later than school does now, but our bodies will be better suited to wake up at those earlier hours.
As a result of unnatural sleeping habits, Johns Hopkins Medical School contends that sleep-deprived students face a 33% increase in dementia risk; a 48% increase in heart disease risk; nearly three times the risk of developing type two diabetes; and an increased risk of depression, anxiety, poor judgment, and memory loss.
While my goal isn’t to drown you in statistics, it is imperative to dispel the notion that sleep deprivation is simply a matter of being temporarily tired or irritable. I don’t know about you, but I find it ironic how the place where I’m supposed to be learning how to think might be catalyzing my future dementia.
Fundamentally, these are the reasons why saying, “You’ll need to be able to wake up early when you get a job” as an excuse for violating the biological sleep cycles of children bothers me so much. Aside from the argument’s fundamental flaws, why should we jeopardize the development of society’s most fragile and critical members to make the lives of fully matured adults more convenient?
