Raising Gpa's In American High Schools

Many students have part-time jobs to support themselves throughout their college/university life. Getting adequate rest and sleep sometimes is not an option for some students. A student’s life is not just going to school and then relax for the remainder of the day. There are projects, homework, and tests to study for, and on top, they need to work to be able to live throughout their life as a

Are you tired and having trouble paying attention in class? Focusing on tasks at hand? Or just completely being overall unproductive? The average college student is deprived at least two full hours asleep each night according to “College Tidbits” a website designed to promote healthy lifestyles and productivity in daily college life. These results were pooled from multiple surveys done over hundreds of campuses throughout the United States. Today, I hope to persuade you to fight the statistics and get those extra two hours of sleep. Do what it takes to get the full seven to nine hours that is suggested by the Mayo Clinic. I will discuss two problems. Why college students are not

In today's society, most people desire success. They want to attend a respected college, earn exceptional grades, get a wonderful job, and make a lot of money. However, the road to success starts before all of those accomplishments can happen. This journey begins in the classroom. In the classroom, over 25% of all high-school students fall asleep one or more times a week (Mayer-Hohdahl 1). Why does this happen? Schools have sleepy students because of their early start times. "Starting high school early is probably one of the worst things you can do as far as timing the day, as far as adolescents being alert or ready" (Wooley 2). This is a serious problem in high schools all across the nation. Students are tired, and teachers are

The primary reason for attending school is for adolescents to get an education in hopes of getting a good job.  Attendance, test scores, and GPA’s all play an important role in a student’s success in school, and if they can all be improved by pushing the start time back, then this issue should be pushed further.  The root problem of students not performing to their full potential has to do with the inability to focus from drowsiness in class due to the lack of sleep they are getting.  To support this point, Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, and his team, “found that students showed up for morning classes seriously sleep-deprived and that the 7:20 a.m. start time required them to be awake during hours that ran contrary to their internal clocks” (Richmond).  In other words, Carskadon believes that current high school start times go against teens’ natural sleep patterns, making them be awake at a time where their bodies aren’t ready to get up yet.  This causes concentration issues making paying attention in class harder, and kids not getting the best grades they can.  Also, sleep won’t get any

The students of this generation appear to be a bunch of lazy, depressed, unenergetic zombies, but is this entirely their fault? After a considerable amount of investigating it appears as if their lack of energy could be due to sleep deprivation resulting from early school start times. When later school times have been compared to those schools that start earlier, there are significant changes in the behaviors and results that students emit in a school environment. Schools should have a later start time that is better suited to the biological needs of adolescents as a way to aid them in achieving a higher quality education.

Frank Bruni expresses his deep thought of the “super” teens becoming exhausted on the high school or college campus in his article, “Today’s Exhausted Superkids”. He supports his main idea by using details of teenagers trying to outrule each other. Bruni begins the article by discussing how sleep needs to be a top priority in students’ lives. Bruni makes very valid points while writing about society’s push for students to become more involved in extracurricular and advanced classes, while also suggesting why more than seven hours of sleep is needed daily.

In “Today’s Exhausted Superkids,” New York Times journalist Frank Bruni expresses his sadness and presents the idea that high achieving, highly competitive students are not getting enough sleep or relaxation time. Bruni suggests “many teenagers today are so hyped up and stressed out that they’re getting only a fraction of the rest they need,” and a variety of causes for this lack, but his main point is other students are causing students to fall behind. He uses his personal high school experience from the 1980s to compare students’ sleep patterns then and now. His word choice and situations allow readers, especially current student-readers, to connect with his ideas on a very personal level. Bruni uses many other credible sources to attempt

“Today’s Exhausted Superkids” is an article written by the respected columnist Frank Bruni who has been a White House correspondent, a restaurant critic, and has written for the New York Times. Bruni begins this article by lamenting the various dilemmas facing America’s top high school students, all of which were presented in the book Overloaded and Underprepared. The problem which he claims to have struck him the most, though, is the dire lack of sleep which has become the norm for high school students. Bruni writes a great deal about how students today are becoming more and more compelled to be involved in more; to do more, often at the cost of precious sleep. He embodies this idea perfectly with the quote, “Lose a few winks but never a

In Frank Bruni’s editorial, “Today’s Exhausted Superkids,” he talks about the lack of sleep present in many high school and college students. He attributes this loss in sleep to a variety of factors; although he seems to place the blame mainly on education. He blames the stress of getting good grades on the widespread lack of sleep. Throughout his article, Bruni used many studies and other writings to support his points.

TV? Video games? Social media? Maybe, but the odds are just as strong that it is homework that has students burning the midnight oil. . According to the National Center for Education Statistics, students average three hours and six minutes of homework a night. This amounts to nearly half of the time students have at home between the end of school and bedtime. And in addition to contributing to a lack of sleep, academic obligations are a stressor of their own. According to health-line, seventy percent of students said that they are often or always stressed over school work and fifty-six percent listed homework as a primary stress. Another thing hanging over the heads of high school students everywhere are standardized tests such as the ACT and the SAT. As most students already know, scholarships are mostly based on grade point average, test scores, and financial need. Therefore getting through college is a nightmare slowly approaching because if students don’t have at least 2 of the three things mentioned, then there will be fewer scholarship opportunities.. The competition between students for these scholarships is very intense, but this is not the only thing happening between students.

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.

“Today’s Exhausted Superkids”, an article by Frank Bruni, shows us how the new norm for teens is to be overloaded with an extreme drive for success. These striving teens are being referred to as “Superkids” in Bruni’s article because the hype for a competitive edge among teens today is causing a lack of sleep. Bruni’s opening to his article expresses his distress towards high school students who are always in search of that competitive edge. While Bruni was reading an article about sleep deprived teens, he had an awakening when he realized teens are so stressed and hyped up that they are only getting a fraction of needed sleep. Sleep is an essential part of healthy growth, especially in the age range of a teen because they are still developing. Furthermore, Bruni makes the point that when he was a teen students were getting too much sleep, but now students welcome those hours of sleep lost in order to get ahead. Throughout the essay, Bruni makes the important point and uses astonishing facts that high school students need to begin putting sleep first because of how detrimental it is to their emotional and physical health.

Thesis Statement: When the projects, exams, and extra-curricular activities start to pile up on one another it seems as though there is not enough time in the day.  This is when college students tend to lose precious hours of sleep and the consequences can be costly.

It is estimated that only 15 percent actually get these amounts (Kids Suffer from Sleep Deprivation). This is particularly important for students who wish to do well in school. Dr. Carl Hunt, the director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, is spearheading a sleep campaign. Her philosophy is, “Sleep well, do well.” This is something that shouldn’t be taken to lightly. Sleep problems effect about 70 million Americans of all ages. Teens often have problems with daytime sleepiness. The old idea of early to bed, early to rise isn’t necessarily the best answer. Society is simply asking to much of teens (Sleep experts to teens). A combination of school, work, study and leisure, leaves very little time left for sleep. Being deprived of sleep definitely has an effect on how well students do in school and may be putting their health at risk. College students who stay up all night to study for a test or write a big paper that’s due often have no choice because of the pressures to do well and succeed, but at what price do they pay?

In an article for the Economist by S. C., the author summarizes that the purpose of the exam is to provide an analogous view of students abilities that universities or future employers can easily reference. However, the fundamental problem with this method is that the test is only empirical if students study for the same amount of time, otherwise those who study the most have an advantage going into the test. With this knowledge in mind, students become overly competitive in an attempt to get into leading colleges and spend a majority of their time studying or in academically related situations. In order to accommodate for cram schools and the extra homework provided by them, students sacrifice their time for themselves and their sleep. In a study published in the Korean Journal of Pediatrics on sleep patterns and school performances, data indicated an average of less than six hours of sleep on the weeknights for high schoolers. Additionally, the National Sleep Foundation attributes behaviorally-induced insufficient sleep syndrome, otherwise known as voluntary sleep deprivation, to, “poor work performance,