Sleeping in class isn't always our fault

Sleep. We all need it. It’s how we get our needed energy. But high school students seem to not get enough of it. 

When asked whether they’d ever fallen asleep during class, over two thirds of SJHS students said yes, a sizeable majority of whom said that it was because they hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before.

There is, however, a common misconception that students fall asleep during class because they don’t care. Also, many teachers who believe sleeping in class to be based on a genuine lack of sleep still react negatively because they are worried that sleeping during class makes students less able to learn. So who is right? 

First off, the notion that students sleep because they simply don’t care only applies to a small group of students. Of those polled, only about a quarter of SJHS students said they fell asleep on purpose, most of whom claimed to have fallen asleep because they had finished their work early and had nothing else to do.

“Usually they look like they are trying to stay awake, but… losing the battle. I have had times where I would pinch myself or fidget or doodle trying to keep myself awake,” Mr. Thomas Miesse, SJHS math teacher, said. 

Less than 30% of students say they’ve fallen asleep in class out of boredom. The most common reason given was staying up too late, often doing homework. After school, many students have extracurriculars or other engagements, which can take hours for some students. Students may try to do their homework in the limited gaps between other activities, but it’s often not enough time, so they have to do their homework when they get home. Teenagers need 8-10 hours of sleep per night, but in reality, they often get far less. 

“[Some] are just busy people,” Mr. Miesse said, “Or maybe… they might lose sleep because of struggles with anxiety or some other difficulty. However, I think that technology… can also eat away at our sleep time.”

However, students do have a way to control how much they sleep: cut the procrastination. Students need to be responsible for getting their homework done in a reasonable frame of time, and many of them, myself included, often do not. Procrastination is definitely a major issue, but it’s also a preventable issue, even if doing so is harder than it seems. 

Ultimately, students fall asleep for various reasons, both inside and outside of their control, and those reasons are seldom as simple as just not caring. I’m not saying that teachers should just leave students alone, as sleeping during class often can detract from one’s ability to learn, or that students should never be held accountable for falling asleep during class. I simply wish to demonstrate that students are falling asleep during class for genuine reasons, and we all need to understand what those reasons are.