With most schools in the U.S. back in session by now, the issue of early start times and its impact on student learning is getting attention once again. The New York Times today noted that 90 percent of high schools and more than 80 percent of middle schools in the U.S. start before 8:30 a.m. The question of school start times is fraught in so many ways.  This writer concludes that “forcing adolescents to get up so early isn’t just a bad health decision; it’s a bad economic one, too.” http://nytimes.com/upshot

If you want to engage in the conversation and get to the heart of the matter, you might point out what often gets overlooked…that sleep has a far more important role in learning than just coming to class rested. When we sleep, a whole host of biological processes in the brain have been shown to be related directly to learning. And, it is worth nothing that the sleeping brain is biologically different from the awake brain. Even when we sleep, the brain is highly active in very specialized ways.

You can up the ante in the discussion by pointing out that advances in neuroscience (as explored in detail in Chapter 6 of our book) show compelling evidence that during sleep we:

• encode memory in the brain.
• stabilize and consolidate memory, so that what’s been learned stays learned.
• actually integrate new information with knowledge that has been previously stored.

If the discussion about sleep gets sidetracked into debates school bus routes, harried families’ daily demands, or even the issue of video game overload … put it back in its place. The science is clear: to learn, the brain needs sleep.

–Marie Felde