With the school season closing in for me, I’m back to being tired all the time and incredibly angry. Why? Teenagers need nine hours of sleep. Most people need to wake up at 5:00-6:00 to get to school on time. Maybe that doesn’t sound too bad to you, but let me break it down a bit.
School ends at 2:20. From personal experience, I’m going to say people take around 15-30 minutes to get home. The average teenager then spends 2.7-3.5 hours a day on homework. Also, there’s a “recommended” amount of homework, and for high schoolers it’s around 2 hours. Where am I going with this? Most people finish school and homework by around 6:00.
Oh, that’s not that bad. Really? Remember how I said that we need 9 hours of sleep and that we need to get up at around 5:30 to get to school on time? In order to do that, one has to sleep at 8:30.
8:30. And we finish school and the associated work by 6:00. That gives us 2 and a half hours of leisure time. Two and a half hours of leisure time.
I also just want to say, this is a little off-the-top-of-my-head, so the numbers might be a tad arbitrary, but people also need time for dinner (20 min), bathing (10 min), grabbing a snack after school (5 min), and in my (and most Muslims’) case, time for four daily prayers (40 min total). For me, that takes another 1 hour and 15 minutes from my leisure time. For people that don’t pray, that still takes around 35 minutes total. Where does that put us? 1:15-1:55 hours of leisure time.
The thing is, nobody actually sleeps at 8:30. Teenagers aren’t wired to sleep that early, because our brains don’t start producing melatonin until 11:00. That’s looking like only 5.5 hours of sleep, then, and only 5 hours of leisure time. I don’t want to research the effects of sleep deprivation a ton right now, but I think everyone knows that a lack of sleep is really bad for you. It’s especially bad for teens, since our brains aren’t fully developed. We’re more likely to be depressed, anxious, unmotivated, and unfocused because of it. And we still don’t have a decent work-sleep-play balance.
I just think it’s fucked up. There’s no way to win in this situation. I don’t really have a fun, strong, rally together conclusion. This whole thing is written badly, anyway, because I’m sleep deprived. But yeah. Fuck the school system.
[Edit: This blew up a lot more than I expected it to. This was mostly a rant about my school in particular, but as people in the notes have said, extracurriculars and jobs make this worse. Some schools also end a lot later than my school. I don’t have any official evidence to back this up or anything, but I’m 90% sure that this is a lot worse for low-income families where people legitimately need to have jobs after school to make ends meet. Also, I have ADHD which means that for me, homework usually takes a lot longer than three hours. And my ADHD is medicated. Homework can take ages for unmedicated ADHD folks.]
Sources below the cut.
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My school ends at 3, to make it worse. And they just advised us to take a bunch if extracurriculars to get into colleges.
