There are so many wonderful ways to say the verb “vomit.” Upchuck. Multicolor yodel. Pray to the porcelain god. You get the drift. But as this is a school newspaper and I have to be “respectable”— hilarious, I know— let me put this delicately.
On the morning of the PSAT, I un-ate right on the grass next to the Door 6 bike rack. Then I stood up and walked inside to swipe my ID like nothing happened.
Plenty of students have had the misfortune of coughing up a sidewalk pizza before an AP test. They stay up all night to study before a terrifying exam. They skip breakfast— or even lunch. Over and over again, they prioritize work before health. Before friends. Before everything.
People cope with the troubles of “the daily grind” way of living in different ways. Some deny it — say a little elbow grease and better “time management” would get everything back on track. Others sigh, hunker down, and let the exhaustion wash over them like waves on a ragged rock. “That’s just the way life is,” they claim. And they’re right.
But should it be?
When did this become normal? When did we accept that teenagers of the richest country on the planet— in a world with a hyper-abundance of food, resources, and opportunities— should spend their time developing hunchbacks behind a desk?
To form a solution, we need to first realize that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Then we need to ask ourselves one question: what should we do instead?
When I asked my friends if they got the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep per night, they laughed at me. And why wouldn’t they? According to Stanford Medicine, nearly 87% of teenagers don’t sleep enough. We pull up to school clutching Dunkin, slather on concealer and hope for the best. Unfortunately, however, lack of shut-eye poses a much bigger problem than the occasional eye bags.
Sleep doesn’t stop at recharging your body and mind. When a human being— especially an adolescent— hits the sack, they are essentially “under construction.” The body repairs muscle and tissue, empowers the immune system, and most of all, builds on the prefrontal cortex. That’s the electrified meat directly behind your eyes that plans, focuses your attention, and solves problems. Well, it would be… if teenage sleep deprivation didn’t cut down development time to slivers.
You know the difference between a researched essay and one hurriedly slapped together the night before— or even better, what happens when a caterpillar comes out of its chrysalis too soon?
Yeah. That’s your brain on seven hours of sleep.
What fires together, wires together. As explained in the November 2022 issue of Progress in Neurobiology, your prefrontal cortex is being grossly neglected because you spend your teenage years waking up hours before your body actually wants you to. So when the clock runs out, you’re stuck with a half-finished brain … for the rest of your life.
School start times go against the will of biology itself. I don’t know who had the bright idea of disrupting our natural sleep patterns and creating lifelong poor brain function in entire generations of youth, but one thing’s for sure: if not for my long-held philosophy of non-violence, I would give them a high-five. In the face. With a chair.
“Listen here, pal!” Education System McGee might reply in between spitting out teeth from being socked on the nose with a high back Chesterfield. “If you’re so smart, when should school begin instead?” Simple: 10 a.m. ten in the morning. Maybe even 10:30 ten thirty. And here’s why.
According to the Sleep Foundation, teens’ cycles of sleep are naturally shifted later. We’re built to fall asleep around 11 p.m. to midnight and wake up when the clock strikes 8 or 9. Given those facts and students’ variety of distances from the building, it’s only logical to start school after 10. But this isn’t just the ramblings of an overworked freshman— the August 2014 issue of Learning, Media, and Technology agrees with me.
“During adolescence biological changes dictate both a sleep duration of nine hours and later wake and sleep times, a phenomenon found in other mammals,” researchers from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Nevada wrote. “At its peak the combination of these two biological changes leads to a loss of two to three hours [of] sleep every school day. Thus, a 07:00 [am] alarm call for older adolescents is the equivalent of a 04:30 [am] start for a teacher in their 50s.”
This puts some perspective on the ridiculousness of calling teenagers “lazy”— especially since according to a KnightMedia survey, nearly 64% of students wake up at 7 am. But if you weren’t already convinced, their next paragraph seals the deal:
“Failure to adjust education timetables to this biological change leads to systematic, chronic and unrecoverable sleep loss. This level of sleep loss causes impairment to physiological, metabolic and psychological health in adolescents while they are undergoing other major physical and neurological changes.”
Change is hard. But just because we’ve always been doing things a certain way doesn’t mean it’s pointless to improve. The mental, physical, and emotional health— and sleep schedules— of all current and future American teenagers will thank us for it.
Speaking of schedules, here’s one for you: wake up, go to school, do homework, sleep, repeat. Sound familiar?
The bottom line is, whenever the average high schooler has a second of free time, they flop on the couch so exhausted that all they have the mental stamina to do is scroll through their phone. Then the night slips away and they forget to ask themselves: when was the last time they took a walk or read a book that wasn’t for school? For non-athletes: do they have the time to exercise one hour every day like people our age are supposed to? Better yet: do they have the energy?
School lasts from 8:30 to 3:00 – six and a half hours. Of course, this leaves out the monstrosity of extracurriculars CollegeBoard says more than 80 percent of adolescents are a part of. So assuming a student spends five hours a week on extracurriculars (the average, according to the University of Florida) and nine hours a week on homework (education statistics from Gitnux), that’s a whopping 46-and-a-half hour workweek. And that’s for those who don’t have a part time job!
Every day is so packed to the brim that no one has free time anymore. (Of course, now it’s called “free time.” In the olden days, it was just called… “time.”) Free time stomps stress, boosts creativity, and lengthens your lifespan. That’s right— by centering work over everything, we are literally chipping away at our allotted hours on this miraculous green marble.
To increase free time, I propose making school days shorter but more efficient. Consequently, the year would be longer, but it would have more frequent breaks. The curriculum should prioritize each student’s learning style and ability to apply concepts— as opposed to feeding everyone a string of information to spit out and forget the second the next test is over. Blocks should be not too long that they lose the classroom’s attention, but long enough that everyone can actively explore each subject in-depth. And let people learn the way they want to. Once you give kids control over their education, it’s no surprise that they become genuinely invested.
One of evolution’s greatest gifts to humanity was bipedalism, and now we spend most of the day sitting. We yanked ourselves up the food chain through one-in-a-million abilities no other species could top— and now we use those 10 ten, blessed flexible fingers to tap at little keys for hours on end. The crux of the matter is: humans weren’t supposed to live this way. This is not the existence we want. This is not the existence we need. The eight hour work day, five days a week lifestyle is a prison of man’s own making, not the law of the universe— but that’s a good thing. Because if we built it… we can break it too.
Don’t get me wrong— restructuring society won’t be as quick and easy as me blowing donuts on the school’s neatly trimmed lawn. However, barfing and structural change do have one thing in common: it’s uncomfortable, but once it’s over, you’re glad you did it.
