Hitting the SNOOZE BUTTON
By Jan Hoffman
To begin, the overall main idea of the article is that many
of the schools across the United States are starting class too early for
students to pay enough attention to classwork. The entire text is mostly about
statistics on how much the majority of high school students sleep, sleep times,
wake up times and also efforts to adopt later start times. One detail that
helped me understand the main idea was the title photo: it shows a classroom of
students that are sleeping. A normal classroom of students wouldn’t be sleeping,
but the author shows how the students aren’t getting enough sleep in order to
be learning. Another detail that helped me understand why teenagers aren’t
learning properly is one that researchers have known for some time. According
to the article, sleep is a “period of deep sleep that happens three to five
times a night in well-rested people—the brain is wildly active, sorting and categorizing
the day’s data. The more sleep you get
the better the information is absorbed.” Obviously, since teenagers aren’t
sleeping very well, the information they learn in class aren’t sorted and
categorized in their brains very well. Also Jan Hoffman lays out some
statistics like teenagers need to sleep from eight and a half to nine and a
quarter hours of sleep to function properly during the school day. She also
reports that fifteen percent of teenagers sleep a maximum of eight and a half
hours. Moreover, an important statistic is that the average start time for
public high schools in the United States is 7:59 A.M. A good statistic that
shows that our efforts our working is that four percent of public high schools
already adopted a later start time of 9:00 A.M. or later. All of these details
support the Hoffman’s main idea since they relate to it and help promote a
later start time in high schools.
Furthermore,
Jan Hoffman wants the reader to think that schools are torturing students in a
way and expecting them to do well on their report cards and standardized tests.
She wants her readers to feel betrayed by schools and wants her readers to take
action by starting petitions to convince schools to start school later. One
perfect example of what the author does to make the reader feel this way is
using a student, Jilly Dos Santos, who struggled her way through her first two
years of high school, sleeping in and missing classes because she couldn’t make
it to school at the first bell, 7:50 A.M. Her school was proposing an earlier
start time, 7:20 A.M, which would result in Jilly waking up at 6:00 A.M. In
response, Jilly said “I thought, ‘If that happens, I will die’… I will drop out
of school!” This example is very good because it shows the reader that is they
are suffering, they are not the only one. Moreover, this example shows how to
deal with the problem. Jilly got involved with a nonprofit organization in
order to create a petition for starting school later. She gathered a group
teachers and students to sign the petition which encouraged a vote for whether
school should start at 7:20 A.M. or 8:55 A.M. According to the article, “The
board voted 6 to 1 to push the start time to 8:55 a.m.” This is why the Jan Hoffman
wants her readers to become activists of sleep.
In
conclusion, I believe that school should start no earlier than 8:00 A.M. Some
people live further away while some people require more sleep to function so it’s
best if school starts later in the day. This topic is important to me and I am
against early school start times as well. This is because of my personal
experiences; usually no amount of sleep puts me at rest. Also, my brother
experiences similar problems as Jilly; his first bell strikes at 7:15 A.M. and
but he oversleeps and always misses his first period class. This topic relates
to other topics as well, like pollution because if transportation was not used,
much less carbon dioxide would be emitted into the air and our environment would
be safer for much longer. However, getting to school would be a dilemma. I want
to know why school starts so early anyway.
This was a very good critical analysis. The topic is something that interests me and you did very good explaining the issue. The detail you used in the second paragraph was a very strong piece of evidence of why schools need to start later. Using an actual person involved with the problem made me think about how it affects other students like Jilly Dos. I also agree that school should start a lot later than most schools do.
ReplyDelete