Teens are exhausted while at school due to staying up late doing homework, at practice for their sport, or even just scrolling through social media late at night. As for myself, I often stay up late doing the loads of homework that teachers have assigned me during the week. Teachers always talk about the importance of sleep when I know they know that it’s hard for students to get sleep when we are drowning in homework. I often hope to spend my nights with my family but end up cooped up in my room, stuck in Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” taking notes for the quizzes I have every week.
I hear people around me always complaining about how tired they are, and yes, sometimes it is because they are up until 2 a.m. scrolling on social media, but it is also waking up before the sun has even risen, five days a week, for 10 months.
In the morning, it takes me about an hour to get ready. I wake up at 6:30 a.m. and leave my house around 7:40 a.m. with about six or seven hours of sleep. If school started at nine instead of eight, I could be waking up at the time I needed to leave my house with eight to nine hours of sleep, which is the recommended amount of sleep for teens. I found that on the late start days that we had last year, I was able to focus more at school because I got all the sleep I needed. I went to bed at the usual time and woke up around 8 am. When I got to school, I felt more focused and way more awake.
Schools that have made their start times later have decreased tardies, fewer absences and lower depression rates in students and teachers. California was the first state to make a law that said schools cannot start before 8:30 a.m., and the schools have noticed that the later start times are healthier for students, improve grades, boost sports performance and have even shown lower rates of student car crashes due to drowsiness.
If school started later, students would learn better because they could be more rested from the night prior and still get everything they need to get done, like writing essays, doing homework, studying and more.
Schools starting later could improve students’ mental health a lot. In order for students to focus better, schools need to give their students more rest time during the day and less homework so they don’t stay up late doing it. Sleep is the most important part of being able to focus during school, and teens are not getting enough of it. I believe that if teachers give less homework, students could be going to sleep earlier and get the 8-10 hours of sleep they need to improve their focus at school.
