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Saturday, July 31, 2010

As long as I'm thinking about it...

The nation is preparing for the new school year and, with it, another year of adolescent sleep debt. How are we supposed to teach classes full of sleepy children? Students sleep with their cellphones close by (or under their pillows), check their Facebook status in the middle of the night and generally are targeted nightly with the "why aren't you in bed yet?" parental rant.

The following articles examine sleep deprivation in adolescents and ideas for change.

http://nysut.org/research/bulletins/981202adolescentsleep.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/from/

It's an interesting topic, especially when you consider that 21st century learning skills can, effectively, time-shift learning opportunities and take advantage of adolescents' most alert hours. How can we use this? Would it be effective? And how can we assess the results?

(http://wilsonshistoryclass.com/blog/2008/11/)

3 comments:

  1. I used to bang on the desks of sleeping studetns. I've since learned that that's probably not the best way to handle it!

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  2. My policy in the library is, that if they can sleep in a study carrel, they need it. If they're sleeping in our comfortable chairs, i wake them up. Since the Library is not a classroom with lectures and tests, I don't need to wake them up as much. :)

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  3. I am glad you brought this up. I have never understood why high school students go to school the earliest when they are the ones that need more sleep (or at least it seems that way.) I do think the new 21st century skills will give students more freedom on when and how they get their work done. In my opinion, it will lead to better work

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