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Teachers, Students, And Sleep By Dave Stuart Jr.

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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

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