School Day Should Start Later Essay

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Teenagers are constantly tired. Our sleep patterns are not suited to the pressures of the modern day, starting at nine and ending at five, which are designed to suit adults who have stopped growing and who need less sleep than those of us aged thirteen to nineteen. What teenagers need is a later start to the day so that they can get the sleep they need to continue developing mentally and physically; trapped in this regime of sleeplessness, we simply don 't get the most out of our schooling, our hobbies and our lives! Adults are always pressuring teenagers to work more, work harder, and to achieve better, but research shows that for this to happen, the school day should start later. According to the BBC, researchers at the University of Oxford…show more content…
Not only does a lack of sleep affect our physical and mental health, and also our education, having to get up early deprives us of valuable time which could be used to improve our health and develop our skills outside of school. Personally, I feel tired a lot of the time - this is aggravated in the winter, when it 's dark all the time - and often I haven 't the energy to exercise after school because I didn 't get to sleep until 4am (not unusual for young people my age). Once I actually slept in until 1pm on a school day! This meant that I had missed most of my classes that day, which in turn mean thtat I was behind in my class. Feeling tired, running on only three hours sleep means that I often want to watch television when I get home from school, and it takes a lot of effort to do homework. The Guardian quotes Professor Paul Kelley, who says that "young people in Britain were losing on average 10 hours’ sleep a week, making them more sleep-deprived than a junior doctor on a 24-hour shift" - this just illustrates the pressure on young people when we have to conform to a timetable created by adults, one which makes us lose sleep and have to work feeling exhausted and unfocused - imagine how much better we would feel if we had the ten hours sleep we are mivving
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