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Lauren Johnson

Ms. Chiquita Boyd

ENG 112-106

12 December 2018

Shortening Classes, Lengthening Lives

Imagine this: you spend your entire day doing something you don’t particularly enjoy.

You head home after an exhausting day, say a halfhearted hello to your family, and head up to

your room. Your tired eyes desperately scream for a quick nap, but there is no time. Trying to

maintain focus, you go through your bag and pull out a sheet of paper that tells you that your

workday isn’t over. You read, fill out various papers, and study so many things that you can’t

remember any of them. Your family calls you down to eat dinner, and you eat hurriedly in order

to finish your work before midnight. You finish your work later than you had hoped and fall

asleep, utterly exhausted until the alarm on your bedside table rings seemingly seconds later.

This is a firsthand account of a school day of a typical public schooled student in Charlotte,

North Carolina.

There are several things wrong with the paragraph above. The National Center for

Education Statistics presents the information that North Carolina requires a minimum of 185

days of schooling instruction, or 1,025 hours. Students nowadays are faced with too much

homework and are at school for a longer period of time than necessary. This, in turn, affects the

social life and sleeping schedules of the younger generation who are supposed to be enjoying life

and focusing on the things that they are interested in, instead of spending their days napping in

classes and struggling to keep up with schoolwork.

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Nationwide Children’s Hospital states, “In most school districts, the move to high school

is accompanied by an earlier school start time. Some high schools start as early as 7:00 AM,

meaning that some teenagers have to get up as early as 5:00 AM to get ready for and travel to

school.” If that same student stays up until eleven or twelve at night working on a project or

studying for a test, he or she would acquire less than the required amount of sleep needed for a

teenager. Nationwide Children’s Hospital sums up this point nicely, “The average amount of

sleep that teenagers get is between 7 and 7 ¼ hours. However, they need between 9 and 9 ½

hours (studies show that most teenagers need exactly 9 ¼ hours of sleep).” Scienceleadership.org

states, “Most of the adolescents of today suffer from sleep deprivation. According to the National

Sleep Foundation, teens are the least likely to get their required amount of sleep to function at a

satisfactory level. By the end of high school teens have averaged less than [7] hours of sleep a

night. This sleep schedule that had been interrupted by school, work, and other activities affects

brain development, and the ability to take in important information. Most people think that kids

just need to stop complaining, but don’t realize that sleep is the most sleep is the most important

in your teen years. A lack of sleep can cause a number of things such as emotional and

behavioral problems, violence, depression, alcohol use, impaired cognitive function, etc. The list

just gets longer. All of these consequences just because nobody wants to shorten the school day.”

Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (or CMS) need to shorten their classes and subsequently

offer less homework for students to complete at home. By shortening each class a mere thirty

minutes and lessening the student’s workload for each day, the public school system would allow

these students to maintain a healthier family life and better social skills.
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CMS could alleviate this problem by cutting their classes a half an hour earlier, which

would also mean less homework for students. The abundance of said homework prevents

students from getting the recommended amount of sleep and adequately socially interacting with

their families. U.S. News presents these numbers, “According to the National PTA and the

National Education Association, students should only be doing about 10 minutes of homework

per night per grade level. But teens are doing a lot more than that, according to a poll of high

school students by the organization Statistic Brain. In that poll teens reported spending, on

average, more than three hours on homework each school night, with 11th graders spending

more time on homework than any other grade level. By contrast, some polls have shown that

U.S. high school students report doing about seven hours of homework per week.”

By shortening the class period, students would consequently be able to spend more time

with their families, have a healthier social life, and get better sleep. I know firsthand how hard it

is to stay up late to finish a piece of homework or a project and get up the next morning to go to

school, only to do the same thing all over again. This solution would solve the problem because

making the classes shorter would ensure that students are able to pay attention and are able to do

their homework adequately afterward in a shorter amount of time.

In addition to these points, Huffington Post adds, “A shorter day would leave more time

for us to enjoy their lives and not have to rush through activities or assignments. We would be

able to do everything at a slower and calmer pace rather than rushing. By cutting time out of the

school day, the students’ education level would not be hurt. The students would be able to retain

the same information whether it was taught within an hour or half an hour. Many people could

say that since work hours are long, that school hours should be long as well. This view is not
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necessarily true. We start out in school and then work our way up to a steady job, as we get

older. Therefore, at one point everyone will be working long hours. Students should not have to

work as long as some adults do.”

One of the biggest overall problems with this plan would be to get the Charlotte

Mecklenburg Schooling system to agree to the plan. Fortunately, the board of education at CMS

are very reachable and can be called or notified of requests or changes. This would mean that

families of students within the system could call and express their concerns about the length of

the school days, in order to make CMS aware of the situation by bringing in a wide variety of

parents and guardians. Other options to bring this issue to their awareness would be to present

the board of education with a sizable petition, to show them what the people of their schools

want.

In conclusion, shortening classes in the Charlotte area by thirty minutes would be

beneficial to all local students, parents and families by providing students the opportunity to

engage in a healthier social life, maintain a better sleeping schedule, and, in their newfound free

time, pursue what they love.

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Works Cited

“How Much Homework Is Too Much for Our Teens?” U.S. News & World Report, U.S. News &

World Report, health.usnews.com/wellness/for-parents/articles/2018-03-20/how-much-

homework-is-too-much-for-our-teens.

Perle, Elizabeth. “Why Students Need Shorter School Days.” The Huffington Post,

TheHuffingtonPost.com, 12 Jan. 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/12/high-

school-pressure-stud_n_1090158.html.

“SHORTER SCHOOL DAYS.” Science Leadership Academy @ Center City,

scienceleadership.org/blog/shorter_school_days.

“Sleep in Adolescents.” Nationwide Children's Hospital,

www.nationwidechildrens.org/specialties/sleep-disorder-center/sleep-in-adolescents.

“State Education Reforms (SER).” National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page,

a Part of the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics,

nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_14.asp.