Alertness In Schools

Although increasing efforts to lessen sleep deprivation for teenagers may lengthen the amount of sleep that students get, there will always be students who, despite later school start times and a lighter load of homework, still fail to get enough sleep. This may be due to their own procrastination or simply the speed at which they need to work to grasp the content presented to them. In order to help these students, households and schools can easily implement inexpensive, additional policies to increase alertness during school hours. One of major ways to improve alertness and mental cognition is proper nutrition. Foods rich in flavonoids, B vitamins, vitamins C and E, and iron are known for improving cognitive function, delaying cognitive decline …show more content…
In order to maximize benefits and minimize detriments, the safe range of caffeine is .3 to four cups of coffee, or one to eight cups of tea. With continued use, the beneficial effects of coffee, such as increased alertness and physical endurance, actually increase and the detrimental effects decrease. Hot chocolate, soda, energy drinks, coffee, and tea all provide a substantial amount of caffeine (Ruxton, 2008). Schools could offer to sell coffee in the mornings and provide tea bags for steeping in hot water during lunch time. This pick-me-up would greatly counter the lethargic stupor many students find themselves entering into after …show more content…
Schools could implement a grade-wide calendar where teachers would input the homework and upcoming projects/tests for their students, along with the estimated amount of time they would like for students to spend working on their work with the ultimate goal of limiting teachers from assigning more than six or seven hours of homework a day. If teachers assign any more, students often start resorting to tactics like copying. Even if they wholeheartedly attack the assignments, they won’t retain much if they finished it at three o’clock in the morning. Ideally, the distribution of homework for each class would be constant most days, even before tests because an all night cramming session wouldn’t help either. Instead, studying spread over the course of the week before the test would be best. Occasionally, one subject may demand more if a big project is due, if a concept taught in class was particularly hard to grasp, or if important essays are coming up; good communication and understanding between the teachers would make it possible for each teacher to adjust accordingly without hindering their own plans. However, while this plan would greatly help students better budget their time, it would be much more demanding and draining on