<p>Comments?</p>
<p>Loomis</a> Chaffee: Head's Blog</p>
<p>(p.s., this is publicly available through the school's website, NOT behind a protected portal. Just FYI, there was some debate about such links earlier in the year)</p>
<p>uh no one can ever get that amount of sleep at boarding school</p>
<p>Some schools have done this experiment: they moved the start of the first class of the day to 8:30AM during a trial period during the winter (during those cold dark AM’s- the covers look mighty nice!).
A few schools have adopted this change permanently for the winter term, I understand.</p>
<p>Some schools have enforced study hals, and even lights-out policies- I suspect their students do get more sleep than the other BS students.</p>
<p>On the other hand, some kids, like my first D, at local HS do commute over 45 min each way and have to start at 8:00am, so they also have limited sleep time.</p>
<p>It is a real problem for all teens, not just BS students, though it may be worse at the BS.</p>
<p>I don’t think so either. I recently heard a statistic that the single greatest debilitator of man hours in the American workforce was…insomnia (i.e., people coming into work so bleary eyed they cannot properly function at their jobs). While I did not pull many actual all-nighters at BS (those many moons ago), if I was lucky I was getting somewhere between 7-8 hours of rest a night and when talking to Pelicanchild about BS life, one of the first things that I mentioned to him–as a recollection–was that your are constantly tired. Curious to hear more from other students, BS alums, & parents about experiences of sleep deprivation in BS life.</p>
<p>Pelican dad- if your child ends up taking any kind of a rigorous schedule at bs, they will not get enough sleep, no matter what Sheila says LOL</p>
<p>My son is complaining about the lights out policy, 10:45. He feels he doesn’t have enough time to study. Yet he sounds tired. I think what he’s really complaining about is how to manage his time wisely. So far this has been his biggest adjustment to BS.</p>
<p>Re: performersmom’s comment, LC has moved the start of ALL classes to 8:30, year round. Of course, for underclassmen, check-in at breakfast is mandatory, so it’s not like they can lie abed until 8:15.</p>
<p>I wish more schools would do this. At my son’s school, even if he’s in bed by lights out time (and he’s often not!), he still has barely eight hours until he has to be at breakfast. That’s definitely more sleep than he got at home, when he had to commute to school every day . . . but it’s still not enough!</p>
<p>lights out is at 10:30 at my school. sometimes you need to wake up at 6:00am or earlier in order to complete homework you could not finish due to having sports, music commitments, and clubs the night before. there are people that wake up at 4 am everyday just to get work done and have a hard time staying awake in class</p>
<p>My D’s BS moved first class to 8:30 am a couple of years ago to help adjust to teen’s circadian rhythms. They also have a 10:30 or 10:45 lights out policy for freshmen.</p>
<p>However, she is a day student. Which means she has to tack on travel time both ways (an hour on the school bus, 25 min if I drive), so I think she has the worst of both worlds - the long study hours plus a long commute.</p>
<p>However she absolutely LOVES school so we all are happy, if tired. She sleeps in on Sundays, the only day without class. :)</p>
<p>DA did the experiment abut 5 years ago. In the pilot term - grades went up, goals in sports went up and visits to the health center went down. They permanently changed the class schedule the next year, and still spend a lot of time talking to students about getting enough sleep.</p>
<p>That said my BS DD never gets more than 6 hours on a weeknight. The message did get through to my graduate however. In college she makes sure she is finished studying for big exams the day before so she can get a full night’s sleep the night before, even if it means cutting the studying a little short. She is totally a believer - and it seems to work for her.</p>
<p>I think this a time management issue for many kids. I can’t imagine that most of them–especially if they’re doing sports every day–are functioning very well after 11. My kid has mentioned that some kids buy Ritalin-type drugs to stay up. Most (including mine) will report that if they use week-end days and weekday free periods to study and work ahead, it’s not necessary to stay up past 11 most nights–mine will go to bed at 10 if he’s really tired. However, the 9+ hour sleep schedule does seem pretty unrealistic.</p>
<p>6 hours/night during the week, with lots of catch up time on weekends is was my children experienced. I’ve also heard lots of stories of Adderal being passed around, although more at college than boarding school.</p>
<p>some kids is time management and others is just the amount of work they get doesnt make it possible for them to finish it</p>
<p>For 9th and 10th grade, my daughter could get an ok amount of sleep. 11th and 12th grade are BRUTAL. It’s the one thing that I find just awful. For her, and many of her peers, that’s just the way it is. A night with “a lot of sleep” means 5 hours. She has great time management and killer work ethic but has overextended herself with hard classes, sport team, one huge extracurricular, and music. I am mad at myself for not making her take a lighter schedule.</p>
<p>My D is a senior. She does not even get finished with her EC’s till 9:00 or 9:30pm four plus nights a week. Then she has to get her homework done!!! She has about 3-4 hours assigned per night, and then she is also reviewing for the SAT, doing college apps, rehearsing for her Music Supp, planning for two music ensembles, rehearsing a special musical revue. Her school has Sat AM classes, so she has work to do Fri nights.
Talk about brutal.
I am just hoping she does not get sick or get depressed. It is really over the top, but seems to be unavoidable. Th pressure is enormous; there is no let-up.
Her favorite thing to do is sleep in (just on Sun!) or catch a nap- a real treat for her!!</p>
<p>Boarding schools don’t have a monopoly on lack of sleep. Public high school kids who are taking challenging curriculums face the same issue. It’s just a common teen issue for any high achievers.</p>
<p>How do the kids even get through classes? I know that if I don’t have sleep I sound like a zombie in math… </p>
<p>Anyways, do they drink coffee, eat energy bars, etc…?</p>
<p>COFFEE, COFFEE, COFFEE. I don’t think it should even be allowed for teenagers but that’s what she does. And sometimes after a night with too little sleep, she tells me she is in a fog during class. </p>
<p>I suspect that most high achieving high school students have too much to do and too little time whether they are at prep or public school. But at our (excellent) public high school, no one takes AP Chemistry or AP level Physics as their first chem or physics class, yet that’s very normal for Andover students. The public school newspaper gets published every few weeks, and is done in an elective class, whereas the Exonian, Phillipian (and I assume other papers) are extracurricular, with a regular weekly deadline. The peer group is so overachieving that perspective can get lost, and overextending seems the least you can do. </p>
<p>It’s really too much.</p>
<p>It was absolutely, without a question, possible to get enough sleep at Andover. And there were definitely kids who did get upwards of eight hours of sleep per night, even as uppers and seniors. As you may be able to imagine, these kids were often among the highest-achieving of the class. But there were also some other things to consider.</p>
<p>It is said over and over again on these boards, but boarding school is a balancing act, and I don’t mean solely in terms of time management. Lemonade made an excellent point in the post above: the prep school crowd is, in general, extremely overachieving. Overachieving at prep schools means not only doing great in class but also immersing oneself in extracurricular activities and school events. The kids I mentioned who got eight plus hours of sleep per night even as seniors? Never saw them at football games, international club meetings, Q&As with authors, etc. I saw them in class and participating in their sports requirements, but rarely beyond that. They also tended to be day students.</p>
<p>Many of these non-sleep-deprived day students went on to Harvard and Yale, but I can’t help but feel that they must have some regret about not taking advantage of everything that Andover had to offer. Some of the most amazing speakers I saw at Andover ended their talks at 9:30, just half an hour before weekday final sign-in for boarders. If you went to bed at 10 and got eight hours of sleep, that means you missed the beginning of your 8am class. And probably didn’t do any homework since last night’s talk began at 7:30, dinner finished at 7, and your required sports commitment finished at 5.</p>
<p>It’s a decision that every boarding school student will have to make. Do you want to get enough sleep, or do you want to absorb the experience like a sponge absorbs water? Plenty of people who don’t sleep enough are also extremely high achievers academically, athletically, and extracurricularly. But some of the people who don’t get enough sleep are also inwardly anxious and unhappy.</p>
<p>Like I said, it’s a balancing act. Looking back, I probably averaged about 6 hours per night, did well in my relatively advanced classes, and even led a few large clubs on campus. That was great, but I won’t pretend that there weren’t days when I felt awful and sleep-deprived, and weeks during which my extended sleep-deprivation led me to feel unhappy, homesick, and demotivated. It’s all about learning which balance is adequate for you as a student.</p>
<p>That said, there was DEFINITELY more that Andover could have done to ensure that students got enough sleep. You could say that that is part and parcel of the ethos of a school that values independence and self-motivation above all, but I don’t necessarily fully agree. Andover could have started the school day at 8:30 or 9 versus 8. They could have deglamorized staying up late by revoking the Phillipian’s ONE-THIRTY AM COVENANT (that’s right, Phillipian writers and editors were allowed in the newsroom until 1:30am in order to work on the paper - ludicrous!) and they could have pulled the coffee from Commons. But none of that was done. All we got was a stupid, tepid “Wellness Week” once a year with required talks on rape and caffeine, which actually extended the school day by a half hour! Oh, and the occasional ASM with a brief rebuke from Barbara Chase about teachers reporting that their students were showing up to class with bags under their eyes.</p>