Message from the Headmaster

‘…The heat consumed me in the daytime and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes.’

Genesis 31:40

Dear Students, Parents and Carers

Your Homework – To Get a Good Night’s Sleep

All of the medical and social commentators seem to be agreed that the current generation of young people in schools is a sleep-deprived generation. This is partly because so many, or so many of their parents, try to pack so much into their lives. In principle, this is good. It is certainly good to take advantage of the opportunities for personal growth on hand, including the many offered at Shore through our Study Centre, Performing Arts, Sporting or other Co-Curricular opportunities. There is also wisdom in keeping boys productively busy so that they lack occasion and opportunity and, particularly, lack time to get into any form of mischief or silliness.

Some would claim that students are sleep-deprived because of the weight of assessments and homework. This is a contested area and probably always will be. Homework has great advantages of consolidation and extension. Specifying how much time must be spent is very difficult as individual students operate at vastly different paces from one another. Too much homework for one is too little for another.

The main cause specified by experts for sleep deprivation is the time young people spend online, particularly on social media and gaming. These can be quite addictive as they provide dopamine surges, wherein the chemical-induced satisfaction leads the user to seek more of the same. Young people who have their devices in their bedrooms often have disturbed sleep, where they are woken by messages through the night. Supervision here is a matter for parents.

Insufficient sleep can easily fall into a spiral pattern where other aspects of life are affected and these, in turn, affect sleep. This is as old as the patriarchs of the Bible, such as Jacob: The heat consumed me in the daytime and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes (Genesis 31:40).

The academic disadvantages of continued tiredness at school are obvious in terms of inhibited concentration and motivation. Recent neurological research makes this even more pointed. Sleep is necessary in order to cement memories from the day’s activities into long-term memory, such that they will be retained. Professor John Sweller, from the University of NSW, has achieved international acclaim as a result of his work over many decades on Cognitive Load. He has demonstrated that, for lasting learning to occur, concepts need to be transferred from the short-term memory, which can be very quickly overloaded, into the long-term memory. One major mechanism for this transfer is sleep.

There is no easy formula for how to balance one’s life between the various callings of the daytime and the need for restorative sleep. This will differ for each individual. We now know from research that insufficient sleep is related to mood disorders and to undesired weight gain. Sleep is, therefore, an important priority, to be balanced with other priorities.

The homework for tonight: sleep!

Dr John Collier
Headmaster