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Why We Should Be Shorter School Too Long

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Having shorter school days has always been a disagreement. But I want to tell you why students are consistently falling asleep in class and how to fix it. School days are way too long for students to handle. Some people may think that school days are the right length or even too short. Some students may like having longer days because they would have more time to work on their homework in school since they would have extra time at the end of a class. However, I believe that school days are too long. I feel the three most important reasons why school days should be shorter is because children need their sleep if they want to be healthy, both children and teens have very short attention spans making it hard for them to pay attention for seven …show more content…

How long do you think an average kid’s attention span is? Well, I bet you were way off. The average healthy teen has an attention span of about 20 minutes. Most classes these days are about 40-90 minutes long. Teachers, just think of all the time you are giving up to teach, and then, your students aren’t even paying attention for half, or sometimes, even more than half of the time you are teaching. As teens sit in class, the amount of attention they are giving is starting to drift off, making it boring for them. This feeling eventually leads to them not caring about their work they are putting in. Students that are short on sleep also can’t focus attention optimally according to the article “Sleep, Learning, And Memory” which causes the student to not learn efficiently. Why have the students there for so long if they aren’t going to be learning …show more content…

Some teen parents may think that their child sleeps to much or to late. But, as children turn into teens there is a shift in their circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm regulates the timing of periods of sleepiness and wakefulness throughout the day. The shift in the circadian rhythm that teens experience causes them to not feel tired until about 10:00 or 11:00 pm. This shows that in order for teens to get the suggested amount of sleep they should not have to wake up until 7:00 or 8:00. Also, due to the biology of the human development, sleep mechanisms don’t allow teens to fully wake before 8:00 am. This is because the secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin begins at about 10:45 p.m. and continues until about 8 am. What this means is that it is difficult for teenagers to fall asleep until melatonin secretion begins and hard to wake up until the melatonin secretion stops. Children however, In 2014, The American Academy of Pediatrics called the problem of tired teens a public health epidemic. This shows that tired teens is not just a problem in a certain state. It affects the majority of America. Mary Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, is nationally recognized for her teen sleep expertise. She studied sleep and academic performance. Carskadon and her colleagues surveyed 3,000 high school students and

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