Getting More Sleep | Teen Ink

Getting More Sleep

January 20, 2008
By Anonymous

The other day as I was pushing the snooze button for the fifth time, I thought to myself, would it really kill the school board to let us sleep in an extra hour? Some of us need what most people like to call beauty sleep! In fact, about 99 % of all schools in the state of Indiana let their students wake up after the sun has already risen. I think maybe our school board had a meeting when the school opened up that went something like this: Random man: How can we make the students hate their lives even more than they usually do? Remember, people, it had to be creative; otherwise, we won’t win the title of Most Abhorrent School Board in Indiana. We do have a winning streak that we have to uphold, seven wins in the last decade.
Rest of school board: (Nods their heads in agreement)
Random woman: I know! Let’s make school start an hour before all of the other schools in the state.
Random man: That’s a great idea. Surely the students will hate us for this.
Thus starting school at 7:30 a.m.

Okay, I suppose there were other reasons involved, like the fact that many parents need their older children home before the elementary students are released. On the other hand, they could just stick those kids in the after school care program. An even better idea would be to let us go in and leave school the same time as the elementary students. All the school has to do is allow the buses to fill to their potential capacity with grades K-12. Anyone who doesn’t fit will just have to be left behind, but that would probably interfere with the No Child Left Behind law, unless, of course, the kids just walked to school. I’m sure their grandparents would be proud, especially when there is ten feet of snow on the ground, and they have to trudge though it to get to school (the schools would normally be closed when it snows this much, except that would mean we would have to make up the snow day, which is unacceptable to the board).

Well, maybe that’s being a bit irrational. Besides, it would probably be the poor elementary students who were shoved off the bus the second they tried to get on. I mean, have you ever seen a person in high school willingly move over to let more than one person sit with them (and sometimes they think that’s too many)?! Try and cram two or more little kids in with them would be about the same as trying to commit suicide, especially if they are half-asleep. Word of advice to all students below the ninth grade: Walking though ten feet of snow would be the better choice, unless of course you don’t mind sitting with someone who is just waiting to “accidentally” bump into you when we turn a corner and thus push you onto the hard floor.

I suppose all of this wouldn’t go over well with the parents. They, unlike us, wouldn’t find it funny to watch a fifth grader try to insist that there is enough room for him/her to sit next to a sophomore and risk life and limb to prove their point. The parents would probably end up suing the school when their child comes home crying about being shoved off the bus because suing seems to be everyone’s favorite past time, like baseball, only there is more cursing and less wins. Then we would be back to where we started.

The only other option would be to buy more buses, which only cost . Of course, there would be the complaint that buses are too expensive and everyone would say that the school doesn’t have that type of money. I mean, it’s not like we’re Carmel, even though we did just add on to the high school, middle school, and intermediate school. Plus we built a whole new elementary school (that no one seems to know the location of), but it’s not like our schools have any money that could be easily invested in making our lives better.
The best part of this whole ordeal of not receiving enough sleep is, when we fall asleep in class, and it’s automatically assumed we are on drugs. I mean, I understand we just had that big drug bust and all of the radio stations were joking that if they wanted drugs, they would just go to Westfield High School, but that doesn’t mean that every student that falls asleep is on drugs. While some students are on drugs (I’m sure the teachers already know which ones), the rest of us are maybe just, I don’t know, TIRED! 90.3452% of high school students’ sleep hours are from eleven to seven. Unfortunately, if we all got up at seven, our morning would go something like this:

Wake up and restrain ourselves from pushing the snooze button, even though we usually push it without even realizing it because we just want the thing to stop beeping

Hop in the shower, unless we took it the night before, and frantically scrub ourselves clean, and somehow managing to get shampoo in our eyes

Wash out our eyes to keep them from going blind while pulling on clothes at the same time

Stumble down the stairs with our vision still blurry and stuff something in our mouths as we go out the door not really caring what it is

By then the bus will have already passed (actually about ten to thirty minutes before we even woke up) and we will have to beg our parents for a ride or drive ourselves

We step inside the school just as the final bell rings and make a mad dash for class, like a herd of hungry people running to the cafeteria (similar to our lunches here)

Our teachers give us the sorry-you-didn’t-quite-make-it-see-you-in-bonus-period look

At this point, we give our all-time famous moans and groans, thus assigning us to another bonus period or Thursday school

Therefore, we obviously can’t get up this late, so basically we all just wish really hard for a few inches of snow that might cause a school delay, even if it’s the middle of May.
In conclusion, the only answer to this problem, apparently, is just to take all of your anger out on the snooze button because the school board isn’t going to cut us any slack. Remember, they do have a prize to win.


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