Abby's views on education

 Why Should Schools Start Later     Teens don't get enough sleep. It isn't due to social media, hormones, or their social lives. It's due to the fact that school starts too early to align with teenagers' internal clocks. Wendy Troxel, a sleep researcher talks about why starting school is detrimental to the health of teens. When hitting puberty, your biological clock sets back the time that your body naturally releases melatonin, a natural hormone that tells your body when to fall asleep. In teenagers, melatonin isn't released until roughly 11 pm. This is about 2 hours later than when adults and young children start to release melatonin. Troxel says in her TedTalk, " This means waking a teenager up at 6 am is the biological equivalent of waking an adult up at 4 am."      Not getting enough sleep on a regular basis can lead to chronic sleep deprivation. Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't only affect academics, it can have a lasting effect on multiple diff...

 The Foundation of Education      This week I watched multiple Ted Talks on different points but all connecting back to the foundation of the education system as a whole. The first Ted Talk was by Geoffery Canada, an American educator, author, and social activist. In his talk, he was stressing about how over the last 56 years or so nothing about the education system has changed. We're still facing the same issues with class and how many people have access to a good education, and we're even still teaching the same way.  So why are we teaching in a way that we now know to not be productive? The common version of "stand and deliver" teaching has been shown to be increasingly less and less compatible with today's students. If this statement is has been backed up by research then why aren't we changing the way that we teach to accommodate kids now.       Sir Ken Robinson explains this in his Ted Talk, "Changing education paradigms".  In this...

School Safety             This week I read an article on the different challenges that are facing teachers and the education system today. One of the sections was regarding school safety and the violence that an alarming amount of schools have to deal with. Coupled with funding for schools increasingly getting cut, most schools are less prepared or don't have the proper resources to deal with major threats.      Due to schools' funding getting cut, many teachers are leaving the job they love, or picking up a second one. Now more than ever teachers don't just have the regular stressors of school, but now they have to worry about other forms of violence other than the school bully. Gun violence has steadily become an issue that schools across America have had to learn and deal with.                                      ...