Seattle Press on Line - Beating the Idiot Box

Teacher Ted

Beating the Idiot Box

By Ted Lockery

Mar 14, 2002 -- Over the mid-winter break, I offered an extra-credit assignment to my ninth-grade health students. They were to track the number of hours they slept each night. Students who averaged eight or more hours of sleep (and whose parents would verify it) received extra credit. Of my 44 students, only six earned sleep credit.

Last quarter I offered similar extra credit, challenging students to abstain from watching television for an entire weekend. Only one student succeeded.

It's hard to say, exactly, why so few students did not rise to these challenges. Had I doubled the amount of credit offered I might have gotten better results. Maybe I should have made the offers later in the grading period, when progress reports were due? Or, perhaps there is a correlation between sleep deprivation and television viewing habits among teenaged students

I polled my students recently and found that one in four had televisions in their bedrooms. One student confided in me that the previous night he had stayed up until one o'clock watching television in his room.

I was amazed, and somewhat horrified, by the results of my unscientific poll, but according to Dr. Dave Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family, my ninth-grade students fare better than most American teens, 65 percent of whom have TVs in their bedrooms.

"Children who have TVs in their bedrooms watch five and a half more hours of TV each week than children who don't have them in their bedrooms," said Dr. Walsh, adding that "kids who have TVs in their bedrooms perform more poorly in school." These five-and-a-half hours, on top of the average student's three hours per night of television, translate into less time being devoted to homework, to sleep, or both. This extra sleep deprivation is compounded by the fact that teenaged students need more sleep than both younger children and adults.

A 1999 study of teenage sleeping needs, conducted Dr. Mary Carskadon at Brown University's Bradley Hospital sleep laboratory, found that the average teenager's body requires nine hours and 15 minutes of sleep each night, a need most likely related to the release of growth and sexual hormones during sleep. A majority of the 3,000 Rhode Island high school students surveyed in the study averaged about seven hours per night while more than one quarter averaged six and a half hours or less of sleep on school nights.

Carskadon also found that students who did not settle into the rapid eye movement (REM) period of their sleep cycle became cranky and depressed; and experienced degradations of memory and judgment. She also found that students getting the least sleep earned more C's and D's than those getting the most sleep, who earned more A's and B's.

Clearly, TV, sleep, and school performance are intertwined and should all be reconsidered among a family's priorities.

For my students to get nine hours of sleep and to get to school by 7:40 a.m. (rising at say, 6:30 a.m.), they would need to be asleep by 9:30 p.m.--before Law & Order, before Spin City, before South Park, and after homework is done.

That's a pretty tough schedule to keep, with or without television addiction. Why tempt your teenager with unlimited access to TV when they are not getting enough access to their own REM cycle?

Forget about the extra credit. Get the TV out of your child's bedroom!

Ted Lockery is a teacher at Nathan Hale High School. He can be contacted by e-mail at teacherted@seattlepress.com.

Reader Comments

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jeff karlick	Nov 18, 2002	seattle wa.	school
i do have a t.v. in my room and i and most other student in my school "jackson high school" which is in Mill Creek watch tv while doing school work. i don't like how you put in there that people that do have a tv in there room they don't do there work. i think you should instead of doing one clase you should have tried the whole school or even extra schools around you. thank you for your article an i can see were you are comeing from thank you for the keen insite jeff


Ross Forbes	Apr 26, 2003	Victoria, australia	student
I would have to agree with what has been written in the article. very much so. I dont have a tv in my room but it is so much of a distraction in any room.