CVHS students suffer from sleep deprivation

Fellow students and teachers, let me speak! I am writing this piece at 2:30 a.m. and the date is Feb. 10, 2011. Accompanying me this night, or rather morning, are my APUSH textbook and a Venti Americano with four shots from Starbucks; I can feel my heart beat faster with each letter I type on my laptop. I have an enormous workload and I need to get all of it done by 7:00 a.m. This opinion is going very slowly but I am going to sauce it up right…now.

This school year, I have experienced extreme sleep deprivation almost every week. I have a zero through seven period school day and the workload piles up. What’s worse is that because of this lack of sleep, I tend to doze off in many of my classes and I cannot process the new factoids of information that are spoken from my teachers’ mouths.

I’m sure many students “feel” me right now. I’m also positive many staff members are reading this and are shaking their heads, sighing at the ignominy a student like me brings to their classrooms.

But what can I truly say? Besides school, I also work with my parents at a liquor store dealing with rude customers who smell like malt liquor and most of the time  also smell like they just came from a sessions of “Hotboxing.”

Many students don’t have the power or opportunity to voice their opinion so I, Tim Pak, will represent the exhausted, grouchy, and often caffeinated students of CVHS.

I don’t like to sugarcoat or make anything too complex, so I’m going to be very straightforward. Ninety percent of us CVHS students are tired! I don’t know about you, but whenever I have to stay up until the wee hours of the morning, I don’t turn into a happy camper. The new bell schedule doesn’t comply with everyone’s mood and the continuous work doesn’t accompany it well either.

Yes, school is a place for learning but when the body is pushed to its limits, nothing comes but pain and failure, unless you are omniscient and require no schooling at all.

Many juniors and seniors also work to earn extra money to either save up for college or their leisure time. Because of this tough economy, students have no other choice but to take up jobs to try and save their fading futures of attending universities and private schools or some other path in the game called “Life.”

However, those of us who push through are constantly fighting sleep and getting work done on time.

One prime example of this is a fellow student, Jane Hong. She is the junior class secretary and tends to have a workload every week. However, she is the complete opposite of me and a good example of a star student and citizen.

“Getting through a traditional schedule is always a challenge when you’re running on low amounts of sleep. I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt so exhausted that I felt like collapsing or fainting, but I am guilty of sleeping during a couple lectures,” Hong stated.

Hong is truly a trooper and an excellent student. I myself am guilty of sleeping in over 40 lectures and the number shall continue to rise as long as I attend school.

Many of us students have no choice but to push ourselves, especially since the competition to get into colleges these days has become so intense; high schools everywhere have truly become places where Darwinism reigns, where only the fittest and most knowledgeable and highly skilled will be picked for higher education. We must continue to deprive our bodies of sleep and, instead, replace it with caffeine to keep ourselves in this continuing race.

I wish for all the teachers to hear me and take this article into consideration. The administration and whoever makes the bell schedule should also get a few pointers from this.

From teachers we ask not to be irrational, and to assign sensible amounts of homework.

From the administration, the population of groggy students asks nothing more but a little more thought-out bell schedule. As I type this last sentence, the hour is now 3:15 a.m., and I still have two chapters of APUSH to do. God help me.