Sleeping

Another dastardly aspect of school is yet another assumption that everyone is a ‘morning person’. I’m not. And neither are many, many other students. Though I am not aware of any scientific study, I think the image of a sleeping, tired teenager, dozing and day-dreaming at his or her desk is so ingrained into the minds of everyone, that it would be fair to say that everyone is not a morning person.

But what does being a morning person have to do with anything? Well, if you are, like so many others, not a morning person, you would be aware of the struggle that our kind have to face being up so early. This struggle is both physical and mental. Meaning that in the early portion of the day, I am not too thrilled with doing equations or learning about dinosaurs.

Looking at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; (kind of a table that shows the order human beings generally want something) one would see that physiological needs have to be satisfied before anything else. So if your genes predispose you for a sleeping pattern that consists of sleeping in the early morning, and if you don’t satisfy this urge, your mind is going to be thinking about this particular urge and not about your performance at school (self-actualization need) (see Ancil Keys’ and colleagues’ (1950) experiment on semistarving volunteers).

What I’m saying is that different people operate differently during the course of the day and having children who don’t function that well in the morning will cause their marks to deteriorate. And also, children aren’t getting enough sleep these days and by just saying ‘go to bed earlier’ will not really make anyone go to bed earlier because many people have commitments, television programmes they wouldn’t miss for the world, etc.