Homework: Because 7 Hours of School Isn’t Already Enough Essay

The consequences of sleep deprivation during the teenage years are particularly serious. Teens spend a great portion of each day in school when it starts early; resulting in a lack of sleep. Ultimately, sleep deprivation affects a student’s academic performance. When students lose sleep, they disrupt their sleep cycles and their bodies respond by decreasing their ability to concentrate and complete complex tasks. A prolonged period of cumulative sleep deprivation will affect their physical and mental well-being and consequently their capacity to learn.

Many students, teachers, parents, and more throughout the country have a firm stance on the argument that school should start at a later time not only because of our diverse sleep patterns, but also because of the negative stress it puts on our bodies, and it even how it can influence our ability to learn. We hear of students constantly complaining about getting very little sleep every night during the school week. Many teachers, parents, and even other students getting better sleep seem to just blow it off or think that students are overexerting the problem. We are starting to see that there are actual negative effects from students, mainly in high school, losing sleep due to extra curricular activities, homework, and any other activities

Picture this, students sit like sloths in a cold, dim lit room, tapping their pencil to the beat of their pulse struggling to stay awake. Daydreams fill their brains looking out the window wishing to be somewhere else, inattentive to the world around them. Eyes stare deadly into their papers hoping for the bell to ring and class to end. Grades plummet, self-esteem drops, and a continuous cycle with no end phases the new generation into depression and anxiety. Late night on their phones, studying through the night, watching their clock tick past midnight until the morning sun, only to wake up sleepless with a whole school day ahead of them filled with tests, quizzes, and learning. Many think of this as a part of growing up and life, but in reality, it is torturous. So, who wouldn’t love to wake up with barely any sleep and go to school? We can only imagine how ecstatic and lively our students would be to get up for school if they were able to get a sufficient amount of sleep every night.

Many teachers synchronize into a vicious cycle of mass homework and testing on the same days. The prodigious amount of schoolwork students cram into measly spare hours balanced between school, extracurriculars, work, and chores, create a psychological burden. Many students of Yulee High School describe their life as overwhelmed and report relentless nights of insomnia. These nights of sleep deprivation precipitates a negative effect on thought process, producing a severe descension of academic capability. No wonder this small town school is overrun with brain zombies. Nearly every student can recall a time of a major headache, panic attack or nervous breakdown caused by school stressors. A lack of free time, and rest is detrimental to emotional development of adolescents, causing those with deprivation in those areas to be at risk for anxiety and

Homework in general can be difficult for a student, but when they get multiple assignments from more than one class, it can be overwhelming. Homework alone can take hours on end to finish without adding after school activities like sports or business at home. Studying for exams can be even more stressful and may take even longer than doing homework, making late nights even later. Students have to study in order to get good grades, but cutting their sleep short will not benefit them.

However there was a positive correlation with success and sleep (Suskind). Homework can get in the way of activities that lead to better success. If the homework load is lessened, kids can have more time to sleep, which is very important to a child’s and teenager's development. Many health issues occur when students do not get enough sleep. The Medical Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School published a research article that states a lack of sleep aids in the development of diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.(Sleep and Disease Risk)The article shows that students need sleep, and with the balancing of school, activities, and home it cuts into time for sleep. With the sleep deprivation and a large workload students are very prone to health issues and stress.

As a busy teen in high school, involved in many activities, I do not have much time for myself to relax and let my mind rest. When I come home from a long day of school, I still have homework that needs to get done. I go to sleep late and have to wake up early the next morning to get ready for school. Evidence from this article by Maria Konnikova proves that the stress I experience from my lack of sleep is not an exaggeration. Because I do not get quality sleep and I do not sleep long enough, my mind fogs throughout the day and my mood worsens because of my drowsiness. As I get more tired throughout the day, I become more hyper, having little control over my actions and responses. This coincides with the theory that inadequate sleep results

At its peak, the combination of these two biological changes leads to a loss of two to three hours sleep every school day. Thus, a 07:00 alarm call for older adolescents is the equivalent of a 04:30 start for a teacher in their 50s. 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."

Studies, and students answer if homework is a stressor. Under 1% of students said homework wasn’t a stressor. The symptoms, of students who did say it was stressor, are headaches, weight loss, stomach problems, and for some, use of drugs. They also start to lose sleep due to stress. Which, according to a study in the United Kingdom and Italy, less than six hours of sleep can increase your death chance by 12%, over about 2 decades. Those symptoms can affect

As concentration decreases and sleepiness increases in students, they risk the possibility of declining grades and grade point averages (Do Teens Need More Sleep?). Conducted in Houston, another study showed that 3,000 students, from ages 11 to 17, were twice as likely to receive poor grades had they slept for six hours or less (Why You Should Let Your Teenager Sleep In). However, grades and grade point averages are not the only challenges that students face with inadequate sleep. As more schools enforce more standardized tests, high school students that are inadequately rested have lesser chances of being able to achieve a higher score, due to their impaired cognitive functions such as creativity and critical thinking (Fallone). In result of low standardized test scores, our schools are now facing more budget cuts and huge reductions in funding. Some schools also may deal with possibilities of shutting down because of insufficient funding that is given to schools based on academic

With class starting at 8:30 AM, extracurricular activities extending well past 8 PM, students working in after school jobs, trying to keep up on the constant demand of homework: high school students put getting a solid eight hours of sleep or even a quick power nap, at the bottom of their to-do lists. "Over-packed schedules and 12-hour days are draining already sleep-deprived teenagers. In high schools where most students go onto college, the pressure to excel inside and outside of the classroom leaves students with little time to relax." ("Power Napping," 1996). Lack of sleep is accepted as a part of high school. We've all seen our classmates fall asleep during a history lecture or video. The problem is that students are forced to stay up most of the night finishing projects and papers or studying for their tests the next day. Some argue that if teenagers would manage their time better, they could sleep enough at night, but with the competitiveness of students and the many activities they are involved in, they don't have a lot of time left.Sleep loss can take a devastating toll on the mind and body at any stage of life, from early childhood to older adulthood. But for teenagers, who are at a critical stage of development, skipping out on sleep can be particularly dangerous.In the teen years, when development continues the sleep deprivation effects of brain and body development are significant. Naps in school are usually frowned upon, but it

Students are always under stress from the pressure of grades, classes, and mostly exams. In this journal an experiment was performed that focused on students’ stress levels during a normal week compared to an exam week. Adolescents' Sleep in Low-Stress and High-Stress (Exam) Times: A Prospective Quasi-Experiment, written by J.F Dewald, A.M Meijer, F.J Oort, G.A Kerkhof & S.M Bögels, recorded that “low chronic sleep reduction and high baseline stress levels were related to more fragmented sleep during stressful times. This study shows that stressful times can have negative effects on adolescents sleep fragmentation, especially for adolescents with low chronic sleep reduction or high baseline stress levels.” The observation of how the high levels of stress will fragment an adolescent’s sleep is an important subject when connecting cortisol levels with age. If a child is exposed to high levels of stress at an earlier age due to exams, it could cause a long term damaging effect to persons sleeping

Stress and anxiety in students is mainly caused by homework (Galloway 3). Excessive Homework can cause a variety of health problems and “Studies that have explored the relation between homework and well-being indicate that number of hours of homework is negatively associated with psychological well-being, physical health symptoms, and sleep.” and these health issues can be very detrimental to students (Galloway 4). According to Galloway a “study of 1,457 students…found that academic demands [were the main reason] students gave for their sleep-deprivation.” and a lack of sleep can be detrimental to learning and engagement in school. A study of Australian high school students showed that doing more homework led to “more mood disturbance (…and fatigue) (Galloway 4). More time spent doing homework, the

To focus on one cause of stress let’s assess the sleep habits of students during a typical school year. According to the National Sleep Foundation, sixty two percent of students in grades nine through twelve get an insufficient amount of sleep. As most people know, high school students should get between eight and ten hours of sleep. Students also usually have to be at school between seven forty five and eight o’clock which means if a student takes one hour to get ready and fifteen minutes to get

Academic stress and parental pressure may not be the only causes of sleep deprivation in college and high school students. According to Lund et al (2010), during puberty, it is normal for students to experience a delay in sleep and wake cycle. Moreover, caffeine consumption and excessive use of electronics at night, further disrupt the sleep cycles of adolescents (p.125).