Teachers, Students, and Sleep by Dave Stuart Jr. for DaveStuartJr.com, 09/26/15 Lately, I’ve been writing about motivation because, it being the start of the school year, I am dying to know how to help my students (nearly all of whom start the year wanting to do well) persist in motivating themselves to do the year’s work and achieve a year’s worth (or more) of growing into people who will flourish long-term. Motivation is their job, and it’s my job to teach them how to do their job better. Let’s take a different tack on motivation today, one that’s almost universally ignored. If my students sleep better, I bet they’ll self-motivate better. And: so will you. And so will I. I’ve been thinking about sleep ever since reading Maria Konnikova’s fascinating, three-part series for The New Yorker on sleep. And then my wife, Crystal, read the series, which got us both thinking about it, and talking about it, and experimenting with it. The fruits of all this inquiry? Ten things, below. In addition to Konnikova’s articles, I’ll also cite Shawn Stevenson’s Sleep Smarter: 21 Proven Tips to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Help, and Bigger Success. (The subtitle is a little self-helpy for my liking, but it’s a cool book.) Facts about sleep that should matter to us and our students 1. Good sleep is a fragile creature. It can be thrown off by all kinds of close-to-bedtime substance consumption, including some you might expect — caffeine, nicotine — and some you may be surprised
Central Idea: That sleep is good for you and you should get your eight hours of it!
Sleep is often over looked as an intervention for ME, but through the improvement of environment, medication, life style changes and self-help strategies, sleep can be improved to help provide symptom relief and increase an individuals energy envelope. (ANZMES, n.d.c; Pemberton & Berry, 2009; Wright,
A lot of people have at least once gotten little sleep during the week, and then tried to catch up on their sleep throughout the weekend. Studies show that when one tries to catch up on sleep throughout the weekend, it affects their attentiveness on Monday morning, and their ability to attain a regular sleep pattern, which is overall bad for their health (Telljohann 7). Sleep deprivation may also lead to more dangerous behavior, such as using sleeping pills at night. In a recent poll, 6% of teenagers admitted to using sleeping pills before going to bed after a long day. 5.7% of students said that if they are having trouble falling asleep, they will have a cigarette to calm themselves before bed. Also, 2.9% of adolescents will drink alcohol before going to bed to ensure that they sleep well (Telljohann 1). What if parents found out their teen was engaging in this dangerous behavior? Sleep is a necessity to everyone, and some teens are finding that they can’t always get the amount they need.
“Why do we sleep?” is a very popular questions that many humans ask today. Sleep is very sufficient to the human body. If it was not important, then God would not have designed for a third of our life to be occupied by sleep. During this time period, many people are interested to know what is a good amount of sleep and what are the harmful effects to not getting enough sleep.
The concepts of motivation allowed me to understand each of my students on an individual level as well. Not all students are motivated the same way and learning new ways to motivate first graders that are not, “if you do this, you will get a prize” changed my classroom environment. I used strategies like goal-setting to get my students motivated to do well on their assignments. When they saw the growth they were making it was pushing them to do better. They didn’t need to get something in order to do well. The satisfaction in seeing their growth gave them motivation. I am hoping that by starting them out with this strategy young, stays with them as they move on to the upper grade levels.
Overview: Today I am going to share some information about sleep and the things that come along with it in hopes of you becoming more informed on the importance of sleep.
Specific Purpose: My audience will understand the importance of sleep, the effects a lack of sleep can have on a person’s body, and ways to improve the quality of sleep.
In the article Teachers,Students and Sleep, author Dave Stuart address the effects of different qualities of sleep have on students. Stuart covers the causes for poor sleep and the consequences this can have. The author repeatedly references the work of Harvard graduate Maria Konnikova, along with Shawn Stevenson who has a bachelor's degree, thus they appear to be reliable sources. Stuart cover the negative effects of artificial light close to sleep, and the many positive effects of regularity in other activities on the sleep cycle. Dave Stuart makes his readers reevaluate how important sleep is.
To get a quality night’s sleep, we first need to separate the myths from fact.
Ever since I began my teaching career, I have been fascinated with the topic of motivation and the role it plays in student learning. Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, has been on my personal reading list for a couple of years now, and I was elated to find that it was one of the recommended books to read for this assignment. I have often wondered why some of my students, and even one of my own children, are more internally driven than others to complete a given task. Now that I am in the process of becoming a school administrator, my curiosity about what motivates adults has been heightened, as well. In the hopes of finding some insight, and perhaps the answers to some of my burning questions, I
Success in life is typically measured by the result of what is accomplished during the waking hours. The degree of effectiveness of those hours however, depend on effective rest. “Sleep is integral to the health and well-being of all people” (Wells 233). Sleep is simply defined as the body’s rest cycle – a time to recharge. The widely accepted metric for normal or sufficient sleep is about 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep. When this metric is not met, either through total sleep loss or accumulated sleep debt, the effect can be dire, “Sleep deprivation results in poor memorizing, schematic thinking, which yields wrong decisions, and emotional disturbances such as deteriorated interpersonal responses and increased aggressiveness” (Orzeł-Gryglewska 95). Sleep deprivation hinders the abilities of the mind, harms the body, and shortens length of life.
The average human spends about 25 years of their life sleeping. That is equal to one-third of a person’s life. So if sleep is vital and common among every single human, what do you know about it? What happens when we sleep (Attention Grabber)? Before the 1950s, scientists believed that the brain would just “shut off” when we would go to sleep. It wasn’t until the discovery of the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) state that scientists really looked into what happens in the brain while we are asleep. Studies have found that we go through a cycle of stages during sleep, and it is important for our health (Orientation to Topic). Today, I am going to inform you about what really happens when we sleep, and some issues that are found among it (Specific Purpose). In order to really understand this worldwide commonality, you need to know some background on sleep, the stages in the cycle, and some common disorders (Central Idea). I have taken a year long psychology course that went into depth on sleep psychology, and I have done extensive research on the topic to better grasp it (Statement of Credibility). I want to inform you on sleep so you can understand what happens when you close your eyes every night, and so you can detect any irregularities in your sleep pattern (Statement of Goodwill). First, I will give a background of why and how we know to sleep, then I will explain the stages in the sleep cycle, and finally I will tell you about some common disorders (Preview).
This week’s article was “Teachers, Students, and Sleep” by Dave Stuart Jr. It discusses the importance of sleep to both teachers and students, and ways to make sure they get the best sleep to succeed each day. According to the article, sleep can be easily thrown off, especially by late night snacking. Also, the article states, “one of the most valuable and overlooked aspects of sleep is an operation called memory processing,” which is a part of REM sleep. The bad thing is, these snack before bed disrupt this REM sleep, making our quality of sleep much worse. Another key role in getting better sleep is regularity, which is “one of the most important factors in how well people sleep.” It has also been proven that sleep impacts performance. As
Veronique Greenwood’s article, “Why Do We Need to Sleep?” was written in early January for The Atlantic. The studies for the article were located in Tsukuba, Japan. In Tsukuba, there is a new institution, the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine. The institution was built for researchers to be able to do more in depth studies of sleep. The benefits of sleep are still mysterious, however, there is still hope in uncovering these sleepy mysteries. The man behind the institution is the director, Masashi Yanagisawa; who created it to learn more about the basic biology of sleep, rather than the causes and treatment of sleep problems. If there is someone or thing that is awake for a long period of time they will eventually have a
The behavior change I decided to focus on is: getting more sleep every day. For this, the article I chose is: Why Is Sleep Important. Sleeping plays a key role in maintaining a healthy life as it affects our mental activities, as well as physical health. When we sleep, the same as when we are awake, we tend to process information outside our conscious awareness. Whenever we are asleep, we may think our brains turns off but it is always still active because of the biological rhythm that is has. Having enough sleep helps us humans, and living things in general, ameliorate our immune system and gives our neurons time to repair themselves. Another benefit of sleeping enough is the fact that it helps rebuild the memories that may have faded, it reactivates them. Sleeping boosts your creativity. In fact, people who sleep on a task after having worked on it, tend to solve difficult problems more effectively. It also supports growth by releasing a hormone that is necessary for muscle development.