Waking Up Early Takes a Toll on Students’ Grades and Attendance by John Vincente

BEEP! BEEP! There goes your alarm clock and once again it’s very early on a Monday morning and you have to be up and ready for a class that starts at 7:20 am. You are not alone. In fact, according to a New York Times article published in January 2010, there are over 17 million high school students across America that are waking up for school so early that they are barely awake enough to get little to nothing at all out of their first class, especially if this class starts earlier than 8 am. A new sleep study done by researchers from the University of Rhode Island has shown that the amount of sleep that students get, correlate to their grades and attendance records. Therefore, what exactly is the reason for waking up that early for a class in which students are constantly dozing off and are unfocused for? There actually is no educational reason at all to be up that early for school as it takes a toll on student attendance and grades.

                        For many years there has been a false impression that waking up early for school helps students stay more focused on their school work since people have said that the mind is more focused and opened up more to learning bright and early. This couldn’t be farther from the truth as most would agree. According to the New York Times article, teenagers have different body clocks and their sleep schedules are very different from younger kids and even adults. Teenagers on average usually fall asleep at 11pm which is when their bodies produce the sleep inducing hormone called melatonin. When school districts across America force students to wake up as early as 5 or 5:30am, they prevent the students from getting the full 8 hours they need of sleep.

                        Can you imagine if we could have all those 8 precious hours to ourselves? Well the researchers from the University of Rhode Island took on this idea to test how the time change would affect the students of a New England boarding school. They conducted this test by bumping up the time the first class started from 8am to 8:30am; just a small half hour of a difference. This small difference had a positive impact on the students and the even teachers. One teacher from this boarding school commented on the matter and said,

                         “On a more personal note, I have found the 8:30 start to be the single most positive impact to my general quality of life at [the school] since I started 12 years ago.”

                        The Rhode Island researchers found that the grades and attendance improved slightly, not enough to make a huge impact, but they still improved. Although grades and attendance improved, there were still a large number of students who got less than the recommended amount of hours of sleep. As a result of this, 66% of students said they became drowsy while doing their homework, 18% continued to fall asleep during morning classes and 36% relied on naps to get through the day. Now, what if the time of the first class was 9:20am perhaps? I think it’s safe to say that grades and attendance wouldn’t just improve slightly, they would improve GREATLY.