Not everyone wakes up in the morning feeling like P Diddy, meaning that most everyone, even a few teachers, have fallen asleep in class. It is unprofessional and disrespectful, but it happens.
A lot of Bingham students are already sleep deprived by the time they get to school.
Senior Sean Hardy works at the Megaplex theaters and sometimes has to work until 2:00 on premiere nights. He is glad that those premiere nights do not happen very often, because it takes him a few days to get back to a regular sleeping schedule.
Some sacrifice their sleep for their hobbies.
Britteny Brown, a sophomore, likes to wake up early to practice the violin and goes to bed late after getting home from her dance class at 10:30, without doing her homework.
Other students stay up late watching movies, playing video games, texting or hanging out with friends, none of which are a good reason for losing much needed sleep.
Even if students got enough sleep the night before, some classes make it easy to fall asleep. Classes that watch movies often, use overhead projectors a lot, or involve a teacher reading from a textbook are always the hardest to stay awake in.
The difficulty of the class is also something that determines the sleep ability. If the subject is too hard, kids just decide that taking a nap is more beneficial than fighting to stay awake for something they don’t understand. When the class is too easy, it is tempting for students to just sleep.
Sophomore Bridget Taylor is one of those students in an easy class.
“The class is going at a slower rate than I am, so I have a lot of free time,” Bridget said.
Most teachers just take off points when kids fall asleep, but Mr. Kevin Moritz has found a more effective way to motivate students to stay awake.
The first time a student puts his/her head on the desk, he gives a warning. The next time they try to sleep, they win themselves a trip to the back of the room where they get to stand for the rest of the week. His only exception for someone putting their head on a desk is if they are sick and tell him before class starts.
“I try to be understanding,” he said. “I just think it’s insulting when kids try to sleep in your class.”
Mr. Moritz thinks his policy works very well because it is uncommon for kids to have to stand in the back, and he even thinks that others should use this type of approach.
“I just think teachers should have more of those types of policies. They shouldn’t do exactly what I do, but they should come up with their own.”
Besides getting points marked off or standing in the back of the room, there are plenty of other consequences for taking a cat nap. Waking up with a lovely red beauty mark on your forehead, which you’ll need to wear on your face for a few hours until it fades away, is one. Waking up with bits of paper in your hair, courtesy of the people around you, is another.
Britteny said she woke up with a puddle of drool on her desk and then kicked the desk in front of her when she figured that out. An extreme outcome would be falling out of your desk and breaking a nose or something else.
Last year, a substitute here at Bingham nodded off in the middle of class while the students were watching a movie. Britteny Roxburgh, senior, took a picture of the sleepy sub, put it on Facebook, and titled it “Students aren’t the only ones who fall asleep in class.”
While there are many humorous stories about people falling asleep in class, it is important to know the reasons why students fall asleep, such as thinking the class is too hard or too easy, the teacher having a monotone voice, not getting enough sleep the night before, the lights being off, or if the class is too cold or too hot; everyone has a different reason for falling asleep and everyone misses out on what the teacher is saying.
