Stein 1
Shannon Stein
Professor Kerns
English 1050 – 152
3 October 2008
Five More Minutes?
For college student Arlene, there aren’t enough hours in the day. Her classes start early, she grabs a quick lunch, and her afternoon lab ends late. Work keeps her busy for a couple of hours, but now it’s time to study. There’s a chapter to be read for history, a rough draft to be written for English, and ten calculus problems to be completed before she can get some sleep. She really wants to talk to friends or see that new Nicole Kidman movie. But who has time? It’s two a.m. already, and her day starts all over again in four and a half hours.
Because college students tend to be young and healthy, they think that they can handle not getting enough sleep. In fact, in college, staying up all night to study for tomorrow’s psychology exam seems to be a rite of passage. But the frequent or long-term lack of sleep, which is called sleep deprivation, can have serious negative consequences. [KB1]
At what point can a person be considered sleep deprived? In the United States, the old saying is that everyone needs eight hours of sleep in order to be healthy. Sleep expertsWilliam C. Dement and Christopher Vaughn agree that this average works for most people but feel that a better way of looking at sleep need is to figure one hour of sleep for every two hours of being awake (69).[KB2]
Recent research has shown, however, that people in one age group, those thirteen to nineteen years old, require at least ten hours of sleep per night (Holden 39). [KB3]This group includes most first-year college students. If classes, on average, start between 8:00 and 9:00 in the morning and students get up at 7:00 a.m. in order to get ready for class, then they would have to go to bed at 9:00 p.m. on average. That’s not likely to happen, considering the demands on the time of most college students.
What happens, then, to all these sleepy students? According to the World Book Encyclopedia, people who go for long periods of time without enough sleep “lose energy and become quick tempered” (Hartman 507). [KB4] The longer they go without sleep, the harder it becomes for them to concentrate. If people go without sleep long enough, then they can actually have hallucinations or become psychotic (507).[KB5]
In fact, researchers have found that “sleep deprivation can have some of the same hazardous effects as being drunk” (“Sleep Deprivation”[KB6]). According to one psychologist, sleep loss not only makes it harder for students to learn but causes them to have more car wrecks, become more likely to use drugs, and become more violent (Dement and Vaughn 116).[KB7]
Even if they don’t suffer these more drastic consequences, staying awake during early morning classes is a physical challenge for students. Their bodies are crying out to be asleep. The stereotype is that college kids are lazy and party animals. The research suggests that maybe they are trying to do too much in one day.
What should be done? Congress is now offering money to high schools that are willing to start classes later in the day so that students can get more sleep in the morning (Holden 39). Perhaps colleges should consider offering more classes later in the morning. Or maybe college students should not sign up for early morning classes. In addition, people should be a little less judgmental about college students who sleep late on the weekend; they are not necessarily lazy, just sleep deprived.
And maybe college students themselves need to consciously try to get to bed earlier. After all, the Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a study that shows that students who go to bed earlier receive higher grades than those students who consistently go to bed at later times. In fact, A and B students average thirty-five more minutes of sleep per night than D and F students ("Teenagers” 25).[KB8] So if college students want a higher GPA, then they had better start making sleep as high a priority as they do class time and study time.
So what should college student Arlene do as she struggles through another day of sleepiness? As much as she doesn’t want to admit it, Mom was right. Go to bed! Now!
Works Cited[KB9]
Dement, William C., and Christopher Vaughn. The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night’s Sleep. New York: Delacorte, 1999.
Hartman, Ernest. “Sleep.”The World Book Encyclopedia. 2000 ed.
Holden, Constance. “Combating Student Torpor.” Science 3 July 1998: 39.
“Sleep Deprivation as Ban as Alcohol Impairment, Study Suggests.”CNN.com.health. 20 Sept. 2000. Cable News Network. 15 Mar. 2003
“Teenagers in High School Need Proper Amount of Sleep to Excel in School, Study Reveals.” Jet 10 Feb. 2005: 25-27. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. Community College of RI Lib., Lincoln, RI. 15 Mar. 2007 <
[KB1]Thesis
[KB2]Information from Dement is paraphrased and documented.
[KB3]Paraphrase from Holden’s article on p. 39.
[KB4]An example of a use of a “tag” phrase that introduces the source. However, readers would not find this source under “W” in the Works Cited page, so the author’s name must accompany the he page number within parentheses.
[KB5]Because this paraphrase follows so closely from the first, the author’s name can be omitted.
[KB6]The source of this paraphrase has no author listed, so an abbreviated title is used instead. Because the source is a webpage, no page number is included.
[KB7]If two authors are listed, both names must be included for appropriate MLA in-text documentation.
[KB8]This information, paraphrased here, was found in Jet magazine but there was no author. Therefore, an abbreviated title of the article’s full title was used along with the page number of the Jet magazine print source. In the source, it is noted that the information came from the JAMA so the association is mentioned in the tag line.
[KB9]Note that each source is listed in alphabetical order and formatted in a particular fashion by the category to which it belongs: book, reference book, magazine article, website, magazine from an electronic database. See Hacker’s MLA Documentation online.