The modern teen is under far too much stress. I know that's common knowledge, but I mean stress to the point of damage to either physical, mental, or social health.
The most important two facts here are this: teens need 8-10 hours of sleep and teenagers' bodies aren't set to fall asleep until 11. Following these two relatively simple ideas, we can reach a relatively simple conclusion: teens need to sleep from 11:00 pm to around 7:00 am - 9:00 am. After waking up, we can estimate getting dressed, eating breakfast, etc. to take around half an hour. Then comes waiting for the bus, which we can estimate to about five minutes. Finally, we go on a half an hour long bus ride to school.
At this point, with the minimum eight hours of sleep, it is around 8:05 am. Now we have our first problem; we have already passed the national average start time of school, 7:59 am. This is not arrival time. That is the time school begins, where each student should be ready to start the day.
But wait! There's more! Even if we ignore the paradox we just stumbled into, it gets even worse. The average school day lasts around six and a half hours, so our average school ends a little after 2:30 pm. This hasn't factored in extracurricular activities, which are often pushed upon each student. This activity will last about an hour on average, and, with the half-an-hour bus ride, our student arrives home at 4:00 pm.
Being a diligent student, they start their homework immediately. Each student has an average of 17.5 hours of homework assigned in a school week, and we end up with three and a half hours of homework a night. Now we are at 7:30 pm, and it's time for dinner. After compressing breakfast and lunch into improbably tiny times (just 24 minutes are spent in the cafeteria on average.) And remember, the entire morning routine was compressed into half an hour. At this point, giving less than an hour for dinner would be ridiculous.
Our hypothetical average American student has finished their homework and eaten dinner, and it's 8:30 pm. What's left to do? Well, there's exercise. In New Jersey (my home state), schools are only required to have two and a half hours of physical education per week. Even assuming that all of that time is spent on intensive exercise (it's not), there still needs to be half an hour more per week.
We're at 9:00 pm now, and we still have quite a lot of things to do. For example, it's unlikely that we could fit a shower into our half-an-hour preparation time. So we should allocate another 30 minutes for various hygienic reasons.
It's 9:30 pm, and to hit our 11:00 pm window, we need to go to sleep at around 10:45 pm. Our example teen has about an hour left of their day. That much free time doesn't sound all that bad, honestly, until you consider this. The school start time, school length, and homework length were all averages. Around half of the nation is above the average for each category, meaning that this buffer time varies. Texas's average school day length is 7.17 hours, giving students in Texas only half an hour of free time.
On top of all the aforementioned stresses, we are talking about teenagers. Teenagers don't need any extra stress, that's for sure. What's the solution to all of this compression? Ease up. Relax. The constant pressure on America's youth to be excellent is absurd.
Thank you for reading my semi-coherent rant; look out for another rant next Wednesday at 15:30 (or 3:30 pm for the 12-hour heathens.) Or it might be late, like this one.
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