\u2026that is the question.\u00a0 If you spend any amount of time around teenagers, like I do, you’re probably familiar with their ever-present sleepy look.\u00a0 In class, in the hallway, in the library, almost everywhere one looks you’ll see at least one teenager on the verge of falling asleep.\u00a0 When asked why, students will often respond by saying “I was up late doing homework.”\u00a0 Being a teacher I’m familiar with the homework demands placed on students, and as a former teenager I remember the added exhaustion that comes with sports, activities, relationships, and working a part-time job (a experience many of our international students aren’t familiar with).\u00a0 Of course most teachers won’t standby and let students sleep in their class, and I would argue that if they’re trying to you might want to rethink some of the teaching strategies being used in your classroom.\u00a0 However, what about the other spaces in the school?\u00a0 Should students be allowed a place in school to rest during study hall?\u00a0 How about a quick nap over lunch in the quiet library?\u00a0 Is this ok?<\/p>\n
At the risk of sharing a “when I was your age story”, I don’t remember many teachers allowing students the liberty to find a comfy corner to sleep when I was a student.\u00a0 Yet, I know there is a lot of research about the benefits of napping, and as a fan of quick-naps to boost productivity, I often wish we’d encourage this practice more in the workplace.\u00a0 After all don’t all those cutting edge companies in Silicon Valley providing napping rooms, video game consoles, and other non-work distractions.<\/p>\n
The truth is although most of our students won’t get their own futuristic napping pod when they start working (unless they get a job at google), the demands of the modern work experience are changing from the old nine-to-five office experience, to an always on-call lifestyle, which might allow for some restful downtime at 1 PM, and some more work after dinner.<\/p>\n
Yet, despite all these rationalizations for letting students catch up on zzz’s during the school day, I also question the message we’re sending students.\u00a0 Truthfully, as much as I’d like a midday nap, I don’t usually get one, and I don’t know many other professionals that do.\u00a0 Also as much as I like the idea of trusting that my students can manage their own time, I find that most of them cannot. Many of them don’t use their study hall time well, they let a 10 minute study breaks in the evening turn into a 2-hour video game binge, and then get to bed extra late, knowing that they might be able to sneak a nap into study hall to even things out\u2026albeit at the cost of a productive math, social studies, or science class that was earlier in the day.<\/p>\n
So have times changed and so should our expectations of focused student productivity?\u00a0 Or should the school day be used to instill disciplined study habits into our students?\u00a0 What do you do at your school?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2026that is the question.\u00a0 If you spend any amount of time around teenagers, like I do, you’re probably familiar with their ever-present sleepy look.\u00a0 In class, in the hallway, in the library, almost everywhere one looks you’ll see at least one teenager on the verge of falling asleep.\u00a0 When asked why, students will often respond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,15],"tags":[22,175,218],"class_list":["post-1450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-teachers-corner","tag-21st-century-workplace","tag-napping","tag-sleep"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5BJbv-no","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}