After my last day of finals, I rushed back to the dorms, content with the end of my semester and packed all my bags to drive back home to get the one thing that I was missing: sleep (and family, I guess). So, when I woke up the next morning in the more comfortable bed, I wasn't expecting it to be seven in the morning.
College has completely managed to mess up my sleeping routines. Throughout the summer so far, I have not been able to sleep in after 7:30PM, no matter how late I go to bed. I blame the sleep debt, completely ruining my ability to sleep for more than a few hours. But this stems from the larger issue. Sleep in college has become such a privilege than a right as students stay up long hours, even just trying to finish the minimal tasks for the next day.
And with Case Western Reserve on the list of the Nation's Most Sleep Deprived Universities, it is no wonder why I can no longer sleep past the four or five measly hours in the summer, where I have fewer obligations than during the school year.
Statements like "I'll sleep when I'm dead" or "I can always make up my sleep debt" are not always true in the sense that these problems are really serious to a learning mind. How are you supposed to remember all the chemical structures of all the carbohydrates when your body had no rest to even process when you learned it.
Sleep is such an important part of our daily lives, but college is as well. However, if we are tired, mindless zombies, how are we even learning the facts that we need to? Aren't we simply going to memorize pointless facts--facts that are bound to be forgotten the next time we get more than three hours of sleep? That's the problem with the education system. We value memorization than learning, just because we don't have the time or energy to understand the subject so well the first time that we never will forget.
And now, it may be a big deal to think that my inability to sleep in stems from a larger problem. But it does. I reflect on my semester, and I fall prey to this education system, guilty of not learning and sacrificing my health and sleep, just because some person in my imagination said that my future depends on this.
It doesn't. Health is one of the most important things about us. If we and the people who we love are not healthy, then what is the point of the other stuff?
And although I may not be able to sleep until noon like my fellow peers or contain this massive sleep debt that I'm building, I can honestly say that I am constantly thinking about how I got into this un-sleep-able position, next time that I wake up at six or seven in the morning.
