Sunday, August 18, 2019
Changing The Opening Bell :: essays research papers
Think about what you were doing at 6:30 this morning - maybe eating                                                   breakfast or just waking up, but probably sleeping. Some kids were already standing                                                        out in the cold, half asleep, waiting for the school bus. Many school - aged children                                                        and teenagers are forced to wake up at an early hour after very little sleep, only to                                                   be reprimanded for being unenergetic, tired, and listless during school. These problems                                                        would be solved if school start times were later.      Some people say that since kids will have to wake up early when they get older,                                                        they might as well start when they’re young. This is not a reasonable argument because                                                   children need more sleep than adults, and lack of sleep can cause major health problems.                                                   According to Dr. Mark Mahowald, director of the Minneapolis Regional Sleep Disorders                                                   Center, school beginning at 7:45 am is the equivalent of sending adults to a buisness                                                   meeting at four-thirty in the morning!      Only fifteen percent of middle and high school students get the recommended nine                                                        hours of sleep, and twenty-five percent get less than six, says Dr. Mary Carskadon, a                                                        sleep researcher at Brown University. Scientific studies have proven that teenagers have                                                        difficulty falling asleep before eleven pm because of bodily chemical changes that occur                                                        during adolescence. People may not realize this, and therefore blame sports, jobs, friends,                                                   and technology for keeping teens up late at night.      If nine hours of sleep is recommended for teens, who generally go to sleep around eleven pm, eight o’ clock in the morning would seem a reasonable time to wake up. Assuming it takes about forty-five minutes to get ready in the morning, and that the average bus ride (for students at my school) is about a half an hour, it would make sense for school to start at around nine to nine thirty in the morning.      While nine thirty would be an ideal time for that opening bell to ring, the change needn’t be that major. In Edina, Minnesota, the school start time was shifted from seven
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