by Kaylee Johnson and Vivian Le, Staff Writers
Teens are required to have nine and a half to 10 hours of sleep a night in order to function properly. (Mindell JA & Owens JA “Sleep in Adolescents” 2003) However, studies show that high school students are more likely to have Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS) than average adults. Some students may even be faced with disorders such as narcolepsy, insomnia, restless legs syndrome or sleep apnea.
“I normally get about seven hours of sleep every night,” said Cody Moore (‘17). When asked to estimate how much sleep an average student gets, Sachi Katashima, a Japanese teacher at Fountain Valley High School (FVHS), said. “I heard that you guys only sleep around like 4/ 5 hours, which I expect you guys to sleep 7 to 8 hours everyday.”
Many students find themselves unable to get a sufficient amount of sleep due to the amount of homework they receive from their teachers.
“I only assign vocab homework or workbook pages, so they shouldn’t take more than half an hour [to] an hour,” said Katashima regarding the amount of time students should spend on her assignments.
On top of that, an aver- age high school student may stay after school for sports or spend time at home working on other extracurricular activities.
“Marching band takes up a lot of my time, and makes it difficult to get homework done on time,” said Kayla Wirth (‘17).
Not only do students have to worry about homework assignments on the weekdays, it’s not uncommon for teachers to assign work to do on the week- ends as well.
“I’m in varsity golf, so that takes up a lot of time. As far as free time activities, I normally only do them on the weekends. I usually have 6 hours of home- work on the weekends,” said Kat Foster (‘17).
When asked whether they believed their health reigned more important than grades, all the interviewed students had replied with ‘yes.’
Foster said, “Health is definitely more important than homework, however, many students will still sacrifice their health anyway for the sake of their grades.”
“It has to be a balance, because I think the grades are not the only thing determining the health. I think, like I said, social media/tv [is the reason]. I know in my own life if I’m on social media too long I’m not as productive. I may not get as much sleep, but that’s my own fault, that’s not because I have too much work or anything like that. I think it’s a balance of the two, but homework is not the reason, the only reason students aren’t getting sleep,” said English teacher Elizabeth Taireh.
Katashima said, “Of course [a] student’s health, So I am trying really hard not to overwhelm students, that’s my goal. So even though [I teach] AP classes, my assignments shouldn’t take more than one hour for all my students, and I know students have six different, five different classes, so we are trying really hard. I am, personally, trying really to not overwhelm you with the homework,” said Katashima.
