On any given day at Lick, you will likely hear the following phrases: “I’m so tired,” “I slept like 3 hours last night,” “My BME final was to get more sleep, but I got so stressed about finishing it that I stayed up all night. Then I overslept my alarm in the morning, missed the bus, got a cut in BME, and failed.”
It seems that from freshman to seniors, dancers to actors, hard-working students to Student Council Representatives, Lick kids are struggling to get enough sleep.
The Paper Tiger investigated.
We first sat down with a junior who pulled an all-nighter on her history paper. “I’m so tired,” she complained, “I worked for eight straight hours last night.”
When asked why she didn’t just spend a couple more hours a week during the four weeks after the paper had been assigned rather than spend eight hours in one night, she replied, “I wanted to rest while I still had time. Sleep is so important.”
True to her word, she promised that she wasn’t going to do any homework this weekend so she could catch up on sleep.
We asked if that would only exacerbate the problem and force her to stay up later on Sunday and Monday night. She replied, “exacerbate? What does that mean? Have you been studying for the SAT? Wait, should I be studying for the SAT? I mean, I’ve been reviewing with a private tutor for the past three years — but I’ve never heard of exacerbate.”
We spoke with another stressed junior about his history paper. He explained, “I finished the paper at 10:00. But all my friends were still working, so I felt like I was cheating myself by stopping. So I read it over a lot of times, panicked at midnight, then started the whole thing over. My teacher didn’t even give me an extension. She never gives us enough time for these assignments and it’s honestly so frustrating. Teachers really need to start communicating about conflicting workloads.”
Sophomores aren’t immune to their fair share of late nights either. We spoke with two best friends about their night; “She FaceTimed me at 7:00 because she was really stressed about finishing both her English paper and her Chem presentation for tomorrow. She wanted to get both of them done by 11:00, but each of them was going to take about an hour and a half.”
But, thankfully, the two friends worked everything out. “I talked her through her stress, did some mindful breathing exercises, and by 1:30 we were both ready to get to work.”
After hearing about our investigation for of our article, a group of students insisted on being interviewed to share their experiences with work and stress at Lick. One began, “I worked until 1:00 last night.”
“Oh yeah?” another replied, “2:00 is a normal bedtime for me.”
“Gee you’re so lucky,” another chimed in, “I haven’t gone to bed by 2:00 since freshman year.”
The last student finished, “all of you have it so easy. I don’t even start my homework until 4:00 in the morning.”
For our last interview, we sought out a particularly busy student who is a three-sport varsity athlete taking six honors classes, leading two clubs, and working a full-time at night. “The history paper?” she asked, “Oh yeah, I worked like an hour a day on that and finished it last week. ”
