In researching the benefits of sleep to assist a student interested in sleep deprivation, I came across the work of Matthew Walker from UC Berkley. His papers have some rather intriguing titles. One of them (Walker and van der Helm, 2009), called “Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing” finds that lack of sleep seems to result in us retaining more negative memories and emotions, and reduces our ability to act rationally (Yoo et al., 2007):
[S]tudies indicate that prior sleep loss significantly impairs the ability for effective next-day learning of new experiences across numerous species. Furthermore, sleep loss appears to disrupt the learning of different affective categories to varying extents, potentially creating an imbalance in negative emotional memory dominance. – Walker and van der Helm, (2009)
Walker’s also synthesized the current research on sleep and finds sleep is important in other types of memory as well. During sleep we organize information in our brains, finding context for the data we absorbed while awake, which is why we remember things better after we sleep.
[S]leep serves a … role in memory processing that moves far beyond the consolidation and strengthening of individual memories and, instead, aims to intelligently assimilate and generalize these details offline. – Walker (2009)
Walker’s bibliography is a treasure trove of information about research on the affects of sleep on our emotional and intellectual well being. These articles will, however, probably need a lot of translation for the typical middle schooler. For that reason, using the press reports on this work would be a much better alternative for students.
This is an excellent program (and website) that really delves into a lot that is counter-intuitive about adolescents. It is strongly recommended for both teachers and students, because it goes into the fundamental question of why your teens seem like aliens. Indeed, it describes the type of research upon which the Montessori Middle School program is based.
We take half an hour each day, usually just after lunch, for personal reflection. Practicing metacognition. Some students have used the time for quick naps, and I’ve been thinking about how useful this is, or if the time might be used more effectively.
On one hand students wake up a little refreshed, and given the sleep deficit many adolescents have it’s not surprising that they need a little extra. In fact, I found one study (Gradisar et. al., 2008) that found that quite a number of adolescents catch up on sleep by napping during the week (many nap 4 times a week for around 16 hours). And studies with adults have found that naps help you learn. A recent USA Today article on the work of Matthew Walker reports:
sleep clears the brain’s short-term memory storage to make room for new learning. – USA Today (2010)
On the other hand, students need practice with introspection. I believe it’s one of the most important skills they can learn by practice.
Ultimately, I don’t have a problem with students napping during Personal World, as long as they don’t overdo it. And if they do overdo it, it may well be an indication that they need to work more on their sleep cycles at home.
To accurately observe nature sometimes takes time. Land-labs are intended to get students out into nature for a week at a time throughout the entire year so that they can see the change in the seasons. But sometimes you need to winnow things down, speed things up, to observe the slow changes that you just miss. Time-lapse photography is one great way to do this.
I’m often surprised by how late my student get to sleep. It can range from 9 pm to past midnight, and I’d love to be able to recommend to parents that their kids should go to sleep earlier. However, the research on sleep patterns among adolescents shows the issue is a bit more complex.
First off, adolescents should get about 9 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night according to Bill Dement (1999) who guided a lot of the foundational studies on sleep patterns. Not getting that much sleep, especially on recurring basis, results in sleep deprivation, which is well known to have a negative effect on school performance (Mayo Clinic staff, 2009). And a lot of adolescents are getting less than 9 hours.
But just setting earlier bedtimes may not work. Late in puberty adolescents’ biological clocks change, creating a window in the evening when it is difficult to get to sleep:
“[M]any adolescents … actually feel great at night and, for many of them, that makes it harder for them to even consider trying to go to bed earlier. So they’ll say goodnight to Mom and Dad and they’ll go into their rooms and read or play video games or talk on the phone. And they’re perfectly content and happy doing that, because they’re also at a phase where it’s easy for them to become aroused and stimulated by these activities. So it really does turn into a Catch–22. When people just say, “Well, all they have to do is go to bed earlier,” well, they really can’t go to sleep earlier necessarily.” – Mary Carskadon in Frontline (2002).
However, Mary Carskadon‘s research (and others) has shown that despite the changes in the biological clock that occur during adolescence, children still need the same total amount of sleep, even if they’re not getting it.
reduced habitual sleep time reported by adolescents may be related more to environmental factors (social, academic, and peer pressure) than to declining “need” for sleep. – Carskadon et. al. (1980)
So the fact that adolescents are not getting enough sleep is likely because of how society has changed. An interesting Brazilian study found that children living in homes without electrical lighting had significantly earlier sleep times than those with electricity (Peixoto et. al., 2009). Another study found that sleep deprivation was related to the amount of multitasking students did at night.
Adjust the lighting. As bedtime approaches, dim the lights. Turn the lights off during sleep. In the morning, expose your teen to bright light. These simple cues can help signal when it’s time to sleep and when it’s time to wake up.
Stick to a schedule. Tough as it may be, encourage your teen to go to bed and get up at the same time every day — even on weekends. Prioritize extracurricular activities and curb late-night social time as needed. If your teen has a job, limit working hours to no more than 16 to 20 hours a week.
Nix long naps. If your teen is drowsy during the day, a 30-minute nap after school may be refreshing. But too much daytime shut-eye may only make it harder to fall asleep at night.
Curb the caffeine. A jolt of caffeine may help your teen stay awake during class, but the effects are fleeting. And too much caffeine can interfere with a good night’s sleep.
Keep it calm. Encourage your teen to wind down at night with a warm shower, a book or other relaxing activities — and avoid vigorous exercise, loud music, video games, text messaging, Web surfing and other stimulating activities shortly before bedtime. Take the TV out of your teen’s room, or keep it off at night. The same goes for your teen’s cell phone and computer.
Finally, I’m still thinking about what this means for students taking naps during personal world time. I’m not usually opposed to the occasional short nap, but just how much does this help?
Yesterday, one of our experimental loaves of bread failed to rise, so re-tried it today and had a discussion about all the things we can do encourage it to rise. Since yeast is an organism, and we talked about the role of yeast in baking bread yesterday, this was a chance for the students to take what they’d learned and extrapolate into a new situation.
These types of situations pop up all the time in the student run business, especially when we try something new. It gets to the critical thinking skills adolescents need to practice. It is the reason Maria Montessori advocated for a boarding house middle school that ran a business. It is one of the reasons I insist that we start at least one new business every year in addition to our core pizza business.
Although I’m pretty sure I’d explained this before, I had a student ask me today what makes the bread rise. He’d been combining the ingredients to make bread for the student run business with a rather thoughtful look on his face. So I told him that yeast is a fungus that “eats” the sugar in the honey and “releases” carbon dioxide bubbles, which get trapped in the dough causing the bread to rise.
I could see the look of disgust racing across his face at the mention of fungi, so I asked, “Would you like to look at it?” He did, and he was not the only one. So after lunch I broke out the microscope, which we have not used much this year since we’re doing the physical sciences this year. A slide, a cover slip, a drop of the residue from the glass jar we used to mix the liquids for the bread, a quick (so very quick) demonstration of how to use the microscope and whallah.
Under 10 times magnification you could see hundreds of cells moving across the field of view. The students were impressed by how many there were. Under 40 times magnification you begin to see cell structures.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, but yeast under the 40x microscope objective looks pretty similar.
We’ll look at yeast again next year when we’re focusing on the life sciences, but when I think of the Montessori axioms that the role of the teacher is to prepare the environment and to follow the child, I think of situations like this. At this time, in this place, after kneading dough for half a year, the student asked the question, and everything was ready for him to answer the that question and whet his appetite for more.
Some argue that despite all the ongoing wars and conflicts in the world today, the trajectory of history is toward expanding human rights. And the people working to bring dictators and human rights violators to account, are at the forefront of this argument.
Baltasar Garzon (from Wikipedia).
One of my small groups chose to do a project on Baltasar Garzón as a defender of human rights. Their presentation brought up the fascinating concept of “sovereign immunity”, the idea that the legal government of a country cannot commit a crime, and they cannot be sued or charged in court for anything they do. The idea comes from the historical belief that, by definition, the king (or queen) can do no wrong.
Garzón, a judge in Spain, has also been pushing the limits of the concept of “universal jurisdiction”, by trying to bring to trial leaders from other countries who have been accused of violating human rights by torturing their citizens and committing genocide. People he’s investigating include former dictators from Argentina and, most famously, Chile. What makes it more pertinent right now is that he’s also investigating members of the recent Bush Administration (former attorney general, Alberto Gonzales; lawyer John Yoo, the infamous author of the memos approving torture, and four others).
Garzón is an idealist, which appeals kids who see the world most often in black and white:
It has always amazed me that politicians keep writing international conventions. But then when the time comes to apply one of those laws that have been ratified, they say “the problem is, economic stability, or political stability, could be threatened by the application of this rule.” So what’s the point? Do we ratify the laws in order to apply them or not? – Baltasar Garzón in interview reported in Speak Truth to Power.
Because of the presentation on Garzón yesterday, my ears perked up this morning when I heard the words “sovereign immunity” on the radio. Nina Totenberg reported on a current Supreme Court case where victims of the military dictatorship in Somalia who are living in the US are suing the former prime minister of the Barre dictatorship who is also now living in the US. It is a fascinating case, with broad implications for the prosecution of human rights violators around the world.
