Isn’t it amazing when you feel like you’ve had no sleep? I know right, I was just being sarcastic. However, this is actually a problem that many teenagers deal with and should be brought to more peoples’ attention. People will mention it, but how often do you see this topic actually being brought up and argued about? My name is Caleb Pendleton, and this is my opinion on no sleep and school.

First, I would like to start off by saying that schools should definitely be pushed back maybe an hour, so that students get to arrive at 9 or 10 in the morning, that way we could get in that extra hour of sleep! And hey, I wouldn’t mind pushing our release time back as well, but it would be pretty nice if we only had 5 classes a day. Realistically, how many of us have taken a class that is not needed or isn’t required and therefore wasting an extra hour of our time? An hour that could have been used for studying? Yes, school is required, but shouldn’t we make school more fun so that kids would want to wake up and attend? Maybe we do have some fun things here at school, but school can be tedious most of the time and at this point, I feel like we just do the same thing every day. I can pretty much always predict what I will be doing in the next class ahead of time.

Kids who get home at a regular time will have to do homework (which can take 3 or maybe 4 hours) which pushes our “education” all the way back to 6 or 7 which is around dinner time. After we eat dinner, which could take an hour, that puts us to 8, and then we have to take a shower, and by the time we are done it’s close to 9. Leaving us not too much time to finish up any extra homework we have. Then you have to think about us being kids. We have hobbies so we might stay up a little later doing things we really enjoy, like playing games, reading, making music or catching up on social media. This can make our bedtime close to 10 or 11 which is pretty late. And don’t even get me started on kids with jobs, that only adds another 4 or 5 hours to all of this. It’s getting to the point where it can start to feel like a 16-hour-shift everyday.

Waking up earlier sometimes gives me anxiety and I’m sure that is the same for many kids. The other day in class someone’s alarm went off in class and that was the same alarm that wakes me up in the morning on my phone which actually gives me anxiety. I will even wake up sometimes before 7 and just keep waking up every 5 minutes wishing there was more time to sleep. They say teenagers need more sleep yet we have to wake up at 6 and 7 to go to school.

Have you ever seen these memes on the internet where kids like to say they love sleeping? Well that is most likely from the fact that we feel like we get no sleep during the week and we don’t feel like we have that freedom to wake up when our body wants us to. You will always hear adults say that it is a good practice to wake up earlier, but then why are the adults waiting in lines at Starbucks, Dutch Bros, and other coffee spots to get their “wake me up” beverages? Maybe if they slept in a little more, they wouldn’t need to go to those places.