Thunderstorm

Right around three a.m.

I mean, at least it wasn’t road construction for once.

Sloth

No, not this. 

Although it is adorable.

There’s been talk in my home town about switching the school times so the middle and high schools started later and the elementary schools start earlier. Whether or not this is feasible is being debated in the town, but my own reaction was “That would have been soooo awesome if it happened when I was still in school.”

Unfortunately for anyone longing for extra time to sleep in, there are a variety of reasons it might not work. Some are understandable, like how it may push after school practices too late and whether or not students will just end up staying up later, thus negating the whole extra sleep thing. But there are other reasons that are just plain rude. One man claimed parents were coddling their children and refusing to make them get up early like in the “real world.”

I hate the “real world” argument. The whole thing smacks of prejudice. Not every job makes you get up at six a.m. A nurse working the swing shift doesn’t have to get up early. Neither does a writer who works from home. Or a stay-at-home parent whose sleep schedule revolves around a child’s. Do these people not live in the “real world” just because they aren’t the majority?

When I was a teenager, I preferred sleeping until noon and staying up well past midnight. Getting up to go to school was painful for me. It’s not like I didn’t try to sleep more (that is, going to bed earlier) but at the time, I was plagued with pretty bad insomnia. If I went to bed at eleven, I was lucky if I got to sleep at midnight. There were nights that I tossed and turned until two, three, even four in the morning and then I had to trudge to school. Which I did every day, and worked hard for good grades. Same goes for college. Not very lazy for someone who slept past noon on occasion.

So I really don’t like it when people automatically associate late sleeping with laziness. Now I sleep at times that are considered “normal”, but that doesn’t mean I work any more or less hard than someone who stays up until four a.m. and then sleeps until noon.

What say you? What do you think of late sleepers? And what do you think of later school start times for older kids?