Late Starts = Smarter Students?

In light of both Dr. Powell's latest blog post (http://edjunto.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/sleeping-in/) and finals week creating a dark cloud of impending doom over the month of May, I have decided to explore the topic of sleep . . .  a foreign topic to most students and adults alike, I'm sure.

Reading Dr. Powell's recount of high school brought me back to my days of high school. I remember waking up at 6am every day to catch the bus or drive to school and having school start at 7:45am, sharp. While our school was quite liberal in many aspects (in MA, go figure), they still never caught on to the whole "sleep is important" concept. Between my freshman and senior year, we went through at least three different types of scheduling . . . from eight classes a day, to seven classes and dropping one, to a rotation of classes. So while we were allowed to go outside for lunch, the smokers were never reprimanded for smoking on the "smoke-free campus," and it was easy for seniors to just leave school, it was still expected that our attention spans withstood the grueling 7:45am-2:45pm school day.

There was always talk about switching the schedule so classes started at 9am and ended at 4pm. However, they were convinced that the plan would not be feasible due to transportation and the availability of coaches for sports (pushing the schedule would make practice end at 6pm-7pm and games end at 8pm-9pm). But that was the problem...
At least 85% of the students at my high school were athletes. I remember getting out of soccer or track practice at 5:30pm, going home to eat dinner, and then working on homework for a while if I did not have work that night. When we had games/meets, particularly away, we were getting back at 8-9pm (sometimes 10pm). Our course work was quite rigorous as well, especially for Honors and AP level courses. As you can probably imagine, people were often tardy to school - with the absentee/tardy list totaling up to twenty pages on a good day. It was amusing actually to see how this played out (for students at least). By the time I was a senior, they implemented an attendance policy that allowed for three tardies a semester and after that, you had to serve after school detention. A week into the implementation of the new policy, there was a line from the front office where you check in that extended outside of the building. Needless to say, the administration still tried to keep over eighty students (including over half of the senior class that could drive) after school.

Back to the concept of sleep, I found an article recently published on Forbes called "Lack of Sleep Kills Brain Cells, Study Shows" by Melanie Haiken (http://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2014/03/20/lack-of-sleep-kills-brain-cells-new-study-suggests/). I actually stumbled upon this article by chance because of the barrage of teasing I get from my coworkers who have the privilege of hearing me talk about all of the homework or studying I have to do after my closing shift. "You need sleep!! It's not good to stay up until your 9am class..." But surely if lack of sleep was THAT bad for you, it would not always be so commonly associated with school . . . right? So I looked it up.

The article notes that after a study done by researchers at UPenn on lab mice, it was shown that sleep deprivation actually damages the brain cells involved in keeping us alert and awake. Researchers also found that when subjecting mice to sleep conditions similar to late night or shift work, it resulted in the degeneration of particular brain cells. Haiken also included data provided by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) which showed that out of 75,000 adults, more than a third got less than seven hours of sleep, and an even higher percentage were tired enough to unintentionally doze off in the middle of the day at least once in the past month (Haiken, 2014).

I find both the blog post by Dr. Powell and the article by Haiken interesting because it brings us back to the question of whether allowing for students to get more sleep will help them achieve more or will it have no effect at all. I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but I would think that less detentions in high school, less points off a final grade in college from every absence/tardy, and higher exam grades or academic performance sounds a little closer to achievement than having an early start to the day. Not to mention teachers and professors are always talking about how important sleep is... But I guess finding a way to budget this late start to accommodate teacher/professor salaries and transportation and essentially reorganizing a system all too familiar is not worth it. I'm just a biased student -- what do I know?