Three and a half minutes after the second bell rings, they walk in. We all know the culprits, Starbucks in hand, deep bags under their eyes and an aura surrounding them that makes you want to curl up and sleep the rest of the day. As the unadorned white clock ticks away, this student usually wakes up from his or her nap. “I was up until three finishing homework,” the student grumbles to a friend.
I witness this scene far too often and can’t help but wonder what keeps these students up so long. Personally, homework rarely lasts past ten o’clock, and the same can be said for at least nine out of the ten acquaintances that I asked. Aside from being slightly curious, I was never annoyed about this issue until I began to hear students openly complain.
I felt that if sleep deprivation is such a huge problem in their lives, there has to be some kind of medical treatment or other option that these students might explore if the lack of sleep has such a detrimental effect on their lives.
At this point, I began asking these students what was keeping them up so late. I figured the response would be somewhere along the lines of lengthy extracurriculars, but I was mistaken. Common responses included video games, social networking or naps.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, only 15% of teenagers receive eight and a half hours of sleep, which is the recommended amount. From the remaining 85%, only a small fraction suffer from medically diagnosed sleep disorders. Therefore, most students have nothing to blame but themselves when they feel like napping.
For students like me, sports every season on top of numerous AP classes hardly affect the amount of sleep that we receive. Personally, planning out my homework schedule during the school day helps to lighten the load at night and save a substantial amount of time.
Regardless of a student’s class load and extracurricular activities, procrastination and improper planning are the cause of these restless nights. Simply taking 15 minutes out of a day to create a plan and a weekly homework schedule can stop this problem altogether.
So why are some students overwhelmed with homework when their peers with the same classes and activities seem to be perfectly fine? One reason may be that these students have the courtesy not to constantly complain in public about their procrastination. Another may just be that some students do not have any intentions of following a schedule and regularly choose to procrastinate. If this is the method in which you act, please, keep the struggle personal.