A regular school day in the United States Essay Example

student needs 9 to 9 and a half hours of sleep to completely be set for the day. This two hour difference in sleep times leads to very troubling problems for students. They find themselves not being able to focus and resort to drugs and skipping school work as solutions. The amount of sleep is not the only problem; the time their sleep is cut off is also a problem. If a school day starts at 8:00 a.m. then students that live 30 minutes away will have to wake up at around 6:30 to get to school on time. “In the teens, the secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin begins at about 10:45 p.m. and continues until about 8 a.m. What this means is that teenagers are unable to fall asleep until melatonin secretion begins and they are also not able to awaken until the melatonin secretion stops”, (Why teen brains need a later school start time). As you can see from this quote, when students have to wake up before 8:00 a.m. this can have serious consequences for the student.

A student’s life is not only school. School expects you to follow this cycle every day: wake up, go to school, leave school, study enough to make passing grades, sleep. This cycle cannot coexist with what a student actually does. The cycle does not factor in extracurricular activities, social life and the amount of sleep a student needs. Let us use a football player for example. This football player goes to school and gets out at 2:30; he then proceeds to go to practice which takes 2 hours(4:30). Once he is done with practice he

heads home which is 30 minutes away(5:00). He then studies passionately for a chemistry test; taking him 2 hours(7:00). The football player then eats dinner, which takes him 30 minutes(7:30). After he is done with dinner he still has to do his assigned homework. This takes him around an hour(8:30). He decides to call it a day and tries to go to bed; this takes him 30 minutes(9:00). Congratulations to Timmy, for he has gotten enough sleep to power his next day. Uh-oh! Timmy forgot to factor in any human interaction outside of school related activities! If Timmy factors in a measly hour and a half of human interaction we get to 10:30. Timmy also forgot to factor in him spending 30 minutes washing the dishes and helping mom with literally anything around the house. This now makes it 11:00 at night! Timmy is hardly getting the average amount of sleep, which is far below the minimum amount. This whole scenario shows why school should start later because students do not only do school.

Anyone that has been through high school knows that studying has to be second nature if you want to achieve anything. It is said that students should study for one to two hours per week for every class they have. This makes most students have to study ten hours in five days. This leads to sleep deprivation because the student also might miss one of these days because they have a paper coming up or they need to study for multiple tests that were assigned shortly together. If school started later students could stay up later and study longer. This, as it

suggests, would raise students grades exponentially. The factor is not only longer study hours, but a better sleep schedule.

The time 8:00 a.m. is to early for students to start school. The students need a lot more time for various reasons. They need more time to socialize, to study, and most importantly; more time to sleep. Many people will argue and say that a student can just change his/her schedule around and make the sleep problem disappear; however, if it was that easy if would already have been done. Students need to do and learn things outside of school ,otherwise, they will not succeed in the real world. There is no way a person that knows how to do trigonometry, but does not know how to wash clothes or make friends, can make it in the real world. In conclusion, people just take another look at the student’s schedule and school times and realize they do not line up.