Students snooze through school
It’s a cold, cloudy day in Jason Bundy’s fifth period English class. The class watches “Of Mice and Men” on the projector screen. Bundy grades papers at his desk and doesn’t realize that seven students are slumbering through the video.
It is a recurring incident throughout the classrooms of DHS: students fall asleep in the middle of class and miss invaluable information. “I fall asleep about twice a week in Spanish because it’s so boring […] I miss a lot,” Angelina Leigh, a sophomore, said.
Most students at DHS get above the average 8 hours of sleep every night. “I sleep from 10-6:45 every night,” sophomore student Kian Bagheri said. But even though students are getting the recommended amount of sleep each night, some are still falling asleep in class.
Catching students snoozing through class is no new development for teachers. What may be new, however, is the reasonwhy students are falling asleep. “I believe kids fall asleep because of their busy lives and how stressed they are,” Bundy said. Bundy believes that busy schedules are making kids over tired. “Between school, homework, sports, clubs and family time students have barely any time to rest until they’re actually asleep,” he said.
Students lose minutes and even hours that could be devoted to sleep sitting in front of their textbooks or computers. “When I have an essay to do, it probably gets in the way of my sleep by at least a couple of hours,” sophomore Kevin Klenzendorf said.
Also, when students are tired it can affect the outcome of their homework. “When I’m sleepy I rush my homework and I do it wrong,” Leigh said.
And students sometimes wake up early on late starts to try to finish up homework they could not finish the night before.
Teachers do not enjoy it when students fall asleep in their classes. “Students get a warning and then I have a talk with them if they are caught sleeping in my class,” Bundy said.
“I spot kids sleeping in my World Civ class all the time,” sophomore Malia Fujisawa said. Bagheri reported that one day he observed nine students sleeping during a video about Bosnia in his World Civilization class. “I laughed when I saw all the kids sleeping,” he said.
Bundy reported that he hasn’t seen a single kid fall asleep yet in one of his classes. But he did say “I expect kids to start falling asleep when it comes to flu season.”
“Some reasons that students fall asleep in class is because they aren’t interested in the curriculum,” Bagheri said. Sometimes when students aren’t interested in course material they tune out. This in turn can lead to falling asleep. “I sometimes fall asleep in math because the work is so boring,” Fujisawa said.
Teachers are having trouble trying to find new ways to get their students to stay awake in class. “I do not know any ways to try to get my kids to stay awake other then to just teach,” Bundy said. Some teachers pick students at random to answer questions so they will stay alert. But many students oppose this technique. “I hate it when a teacher calls on me when I don’t raise my hand,” sophomore Kiki Tanaka said.
