Toronto Teenagers May Get To Sleep In
October 31st, 2007 |
There have been several studies showing that teenagers are chronically sleep deprived. This is certainly not earth shattering news to any parents of teenagers, or to those of us who remember our own teenaged years. Studies have also shown that sleep deprivation can be responsible for a drop in grades – also not a surprise. The big surprise is what the Toronto District School Board is planning to do about it. |
The TDSB is looking to set up a pilot project in one high school in the Greater Toronto Area where classes would not begin until 11:30 AM. The school has yet to be selected. This has been tried in several schools in the U.S. and they are reporting less absenteeism, fewer dropouts, and better grades. However they are not mentioning what time the classes started. As an example, there are schools in the U.S. that had 7:15 AM start times who moved to 8:30 AM – not 11:30 AM as planned for the school in the Greater Toronto Area.
I thought that the students in the GTA would be jumping up and down with joy at the thought of starting school so late, but many are concerned that this will interfere with their part time jobs. It will also be difficult to coordinate with teachers’ schedules, after school activities, and busing.
What do you think about this idea? Are we giving teenagers a scholastic advantage? Or are we giving them permission to go to bed too late and get up too late? What ever happened to “Early to bed, and early to rise……”?
November 1st, 2007 at 2:18 pm
If more of these young adults had a a decent sleep pattern they’d be fine. Go to bed at 11pm every night and wake at 6 or 7 in the morning. When you stay up til 3am one night then go to bed at 12am some other night it really messes with your body. Any person could survive fine with 5 hours of sleep a night as long as they go their body use to it. Also, drink more water, it’s proven to help daytime fatigue as well as hunger. Worked for me.
November 10th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Forcing kids sleep schedules early is a bad idea (although its manditory due to societial reasons), as well as shortcutting it. IMO, the solution isn’t easy. If kids had a natural sleep schedule, many parents would leave for work before their kids woke up. If people really want to pull this off (and i believe they should), first they would have to overcome massive ignorance of nature (thinking that kids and adults can wake up at 6 with equal effort), get people to care enough to change school schedules, change school schedules, change school workers and kids work schedules, and we would even have to change the 9-5 workday (or have housewives) so parents could see their kids off to school in the morning. P.S. I know the housewives comment was politically incorrect, but I believe that women are generally better caretakers of children, I’m sexist.
November 10th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Sparticus -
You clearly are not conversant with any recent research. For a good summary of the different studies done regarding the need for adequate sleep, you should read the article “Snooze or Lose” from New York Magazine. Here is a link - http://nymag.com/news/features/38951/
Two of the bits that really stood out to me from the article. One - the loss of an hour of sleep by sixth graders drops their performance on standardized tests to that of fourth graders; lose one hour of sleep and lose two years of school.
Two - for adults who average six hours of sleep per night for two weeks, though they claim that they feel fine and don’t have any faculty loss, perform the same on standardized tests as people who have not slept for 24-hours.
And as far as “getting your body used to it,” the research is beginning to indicate that prolonged marginal sleep loss in children, adolescents and college students (people whose brains are still developing physically) could cause permanent marginal loss of mental faculty. This is not yet proven, but it is starting to appear likely.
Perhaps if you got more sleep, you would have realized this.
November 10th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
I am 16 and attend highschool in Whitby. Although I would love to be able to sleep in every day, I agree with the above comment. I think it would be better just to get better sleeping patterns and get our bodies used to waking up early by going to bed earlier every night. It would definately interfere with many things to be getting out of school so late. My school starts at 8:15, and maybe if they moved that up an hour it would be fine, but I’m not sure that it would make much of a difference. I think starting school at 11:30 is a mistake and I definately think regular sleeping patterns would be better for teenagers.
Although 11:30 sounds nice :), I just think it would interfere with too many things.
November 11th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Teenagers need as much if not more sleep than a newborn infant, studies have shown. So of course they’re sleep deprived if they’re made to adjust to a more adult pattern, what with tons of homework on top of a job on top of a social life on top of school activities on top of school. I went to sleep no later than midnight on the vast majorities of school nights when I was in high school and woke up at around 745, and I was STILL tired, even though my body adjusted to that schedule and woke me up automatically about 8 hours after I went to sleep every night.
November 12th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
I believe this is an interesting idea, I myself am actually truant from school, due to insomnia, and oversleeping. It is a proven fact that due to chemical imbalances, most teenagers suffer from an erratic sleep schedule.
November 14th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
As a reply to Sparticus
Most teenagers need more (mush more) then 5 hours of sleep due to continuous growth and other happenings with a teenagers body. 5 hours would be fine for most adults but for teenagers this is simply not sufficient.
November 15th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
I’m sixteen years old and I can see both sides of this. I wake up at 6 am every day, and am still in a fog for the first half of the day at school. Obviously, that’s a problem. When I get home from school, I take a nap even though I know I shouldn’t. Then I stay up until all hours of the night doing homework, working, or countless other things and repeat the cycle all over again the next day. It’s exhausting. School starts for me at 7:40 and I think that maybe a 9 or 9:30 start would be much more reasonable.
November 18th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I truly believe that school should start at 11:30. My school starts at 8:30 and ironically, is trying to make the day start earlier. This certainly pisses me off that a school as good as mine should try to increase the stress of the kids in our school and kids in toronto wake up earlier.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
AH jaysus. I think that 11:30 is too late, because when you wake up and get through the regular 7 hour day, than that would leave you home by 6. Which is right at dinner time, giving you less time to do what you really need to do. Your daily routines will be different, as in your bed time would (or should) get much later, and breakfast will be late in the day, I think that it will regular out and the cycle will start all over again. You’ll be sleeping in compared to when you wake up now, and you probably will be for the first semester of school, but after that, your patterns will even out and you will stay up later. You’ll still have the same amount of homework, and a 24 hour day.
Honestly, I think the solution to less stressful teenagers is different curricular. I mean, the way we learn is NOTES, study them, then test. With a few projects on the side. We’re not actually LEARNING anything, we are just memorizing. And if it’s not something we are interested in, than we really don’t want to do it and get distracted. Thus making the learning take longer than it should. Everything is about TESTS TESTS TESTS nowadays and I find it utterly ridiculous.
Mark Twain said “don’t let school interfere with your education”.
There’s this Dan Perjovschi drawing of these teachers with talk-bubbles coming out of there mouths and theres a kid with his head in the bubble. Genius. This has nothing to do with anything. Please excuse me.
I am 13. I do not get enough sleep.
Can you tell?
November 20th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
When I was in high school, for the latter half of those 4 years I got maybe 5 hours of sleep per night. School started at 7:30, so I had to get up a little before 6. In 11th grade, my grades were lower than they’d been in a long time (although I was probably a bit lazy, and I never got below a B in anything). In 12th grade, my grades improved a lot, probably because I had very little homework, and didn’t need to stay up as late.
Now that I’m in college, my earliest class this semester starts at 9, and I get to sleep in another hour.
I have an A in math. Actually, I have an A in all my classes.
Just saying.
November 21st, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I am 13 and have a light sleep disorder. During the day I find myself losing focus on the current subject that my teacher’s are talking about (not uncommon for teenagers, I know, but usually uncommon for me). At night I usually go to bed around 9:30 but find myself staying awake until 11. I have to wake up at 6 AM. This means I get 7 hours of sleep each night.
As much as I would love to be able to go to school at 11:30, I do not think this is a good idea. My school starts at 7:30 and runs until 2. Our chooldays are getting longer, which will interfere with other matters. To get through a 7 hour day of school if school starts at 11:30 would be terrible. Not only would it interfere with personal and family lives, but I think that there would be MORE absentses, not less. Many teenagers will not want to come home from school at 6.
I think that a school day starting at 8 or 9 in the morning would be much more acceptable (I envy those of you who already have this.)
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:36 am
I currently attend a residential boarding school. We have class from 7:30 am-4:15pm mon, tues, thurs and fri. Many students throughout the day have breaks, but not all. On Wednesdays, about half of the upperclassmen go off-campus to do research projects. Most students leave at 7 am and return around 6:15 pm. Most students get just short of 5 hours of sleep a night. Personally, i’d much prefer a 9:30-4:15, and then a second bloc from 7-9 pm. Except that messes up sports. I think that would be ideal though.