Early school start times affect how teenagers …show more content…
Russel Foster, a British professor of circadian neuroscience, proves in his article “The Science of Sleepy Teens” that physical needs of teens and their sleep cycles change during adolescence, which encourages to delay their sleep cycles. This evidence would prove that sleep cycles are only generally messy during the teen years because of the average physical and mental demands that a teenage body goes through on a daily basis. Establishing a later start time in schools would only worsen the situation students face after school. Proponents of Foster are right to argue that delaying the start of a school day would only contribute more to the problem, but he is generalizing when he claims that all teenagers can handle the amount of workload thrown at them every day because of how their biological make-up is. The National Sleep Foundation found that their research has shown that sleep deprivation has a large negative impact on coordination and endurance, resulting in a better performance from students in school which result to a higher GPA (National Sleep Foundation). Although school start times may seem of concern to only a small group of students, it should in fact concern anyone who suffers from sleep deprivation or who has a low performance in extracurricular activities and scientists need to acknowledge the fact that being a sleep-deprived teenager is not “just a phase” and that a teenage body is affected in the same way that an adult's body who would be