Humans have long been suspicious of those who do not need sleep. Victorian author and wit Oscar Wilde wrote: “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.”
The comedian Mindy Kaling writes with similar damnation: “There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.”
Retired professional boxer George Foreman says sleep defeated him long before he entered the professional ring: “I think sleeping was my problem in school. If school had started at four in the afternoon, I’d be a college graduate today.”
Recent research supports Foreman’s intuition and confirms what parents who have had to wrestle a bleary-eyed, bearish youth from their beds know. Studies show that, nationally, 90 percent high school students aren’t getting nearly enough shut-eye.
The teenage sleep drought is real in Durango, where every morning, exhausted teenagers walk through the high school parking lot with the glazed eyes and monolithic stride of zombies forced to do the bidding of a remote paranormal entity.
Durango High School senior Elle Rathbun said on average, she gets four hours’ sleep a night.
“Currently, I’m taking five AP classes, and I have leadership roles in the newspaper, the Knowledge Bowl and the national honor society – and I’m also involved in theater,” Rathbun said.
She said she was able to manage her academic and extra-curricular commitments because, “I am really good at pulling all-nighters. Usually, Friday nights are when I can catch up on my sleep. Then, I have the weekend for homework.
“It’s really a never-ending cycle of work, and I’m really trying to balance my life even though I’m not getting enough sleep,” she said.
Adults’ nostalgic notions of high school as a time when kids can act out, make mistakes, discover themselves and cap off the best years of their life with prom have little to do with modern teenage experience, when few students escape the consuming pressure of college admissions.
Rathbun and fellow DHS senior Kaylee Blevins wrote an op-ed in the most recent edition of El Diablo, DHS’s student newspaper, talking about the stress seniors face.
It made teenage existence in Durango sound less like “the young and the restless” than “the young and unrested.”
“Aside from all the lovey-dovey parts of realizing it’s the last year, there are, of course, the harsh realities of the stress of college and the impending future,” they wrote.
“Before we can fully enjoy the privileges of ‘ruling the school,’ however, we have about a million essays to write, thousands applications to fill, and, yes, even more future-deciding tests.
“Throw in sports, clubs, meetings, actual school and the regular stresses of life, and you have a bunch of tightly wound, maxed-out 17- and 18-year-olds, ready to just run away into the mountains and live life as a deaf-mute,” they wrote.
Rathbun and Blevins acknowledged the tough choices facing their classmates head on: “How do life and sleep ever fit in? Sometimes, they don’t,” they concluded.
While college admissions partly account for the frantic, conveyor-belt pace of teens’ lives, the schedule of the school day also may contribute to their chronic sleep deficit.
Indeed, some educators are now advocating a later start time for high schools across the country.
Dr. Mary Carskadon, director of chronobiology/sleep research at E.P. Bradley Hospital in Providence, R.I., and a professor in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University School of Medicine, found that older teenagers actually fall asleep and wake up later than their adult or younger adolescent counterparts.
Dr. Carskadon has argued that optimally, adolescents need about 9 hours and 15 minutes of sleep a night.
Recent science shows adequate sleep is not only crucial to learning calculus: Sleep also allows children to remember their previous day’s lessons better.
High schools typically start about 8 in the morning, a schedule based on the agrarian assumption that students would be needed for chores around 3 in the afternoon. Given most teenagers’ biological tendency to fall asleep between 10 and 11:30 p.m., there may be an academic cost built into DHS’s first-period start time of 8:15.
Durango School District 9-R spokeswoman Julie Popp said the district had no plans to re-evaluate the high school’s schedule.
But she said she remembered needing inordinate amounts of sleep as a teenager and said she sympathized with current high school students’ sleepy plights.
Popp said given the chaos parents face in dropping off children of different ages at schools on time, there might be some benefit to having staggered start times.
Rathbun wasn’t convinced. She said she thought school started too early for a lot of teenagers.
But she said it wasn’t clear what starting the day later would achieve.
“I feel like a late start would be nice, but it would also just result in school ending later, meaning after-school activities start later, and I start homework later,” she said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
