Essay About Moving School Start Times

756 Words4 Pages

School start times have been talked about a lot, people always wonder if there are any true benefits of starting later and others say there are better solutions than moving school times. Though there are many arguments on both sides of this problem, in the end, school start times should be moved back for teens. In the majority of the United States school begins before 8:30, this doesn’t seem like too much of a problem when just looking at the surface, but as we dig deeper, the true problems are revealed. The main problems are caused by the lack and inefficient sleep in response to earlier start times and include things such as stress, impaired memory, and enhanced emotions. Moving back the school times would also contribute to improved testing. Overall by moving the start of school, there are many problems that can be resolved. A solution we hear all the time to the lack of sleep is “Teens who need more sleep should go to bed earlier” but for teens this isn’t exactly possible. Everyone has an internal system that causes us to feel sleepy and awake at certain times, this is called the circadian rhythm which changes at certain …show more content…

The biggest thing the lack of sleep causes is stress but there are also so many other things. When we have this lack of sleep there are many ways our brain is affected, such as causing the lack of focus, bad eating habits, bad conversational skills, and slow reflects . But two of the main problems that affect school life are the enlargement of the amygdala and the hippocampus shrinking. As this happens our emotions are enhanced causing us to have less patience in classroom teaching and we begin to have a harder time focusing and retaining information. These two things are mainly caused by the stress caused by the lack of sleep which can also cause