Sleep!

This is Mr. Weber's talk to students on October 1, 2012.

We all want it. We don’t get enough of it. We are less without it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to students in Dr. Noah’s class make a presentation on why school should begin later—the arguments, incidentally, were very compelling—but at least three presentations made the point that students don’t get enough sleep at JPII partly because they regard sleep as a luxury—that if they’re getting more than 5-6 hours on a weeknight, they feel guilty about it, as if they were wasting time, or being lazy. (The science, by the way, says teenagers should be getting 8-10 hours of sleep each night. I’d wager a bet that almost NONE of you come close to that.)

Part of the problem is we’re all too busy. The forty-hour work week is no more; the average American works 46 hours/week, almost the equivalent of an extra day, and almost 40% of America works in excess of fifty hours on average. But it’s more than that. The promise of technology was to make our lives simpler and more efficient, but it’s also made us slaves to the present. It’s hard to have a five-minute, uninterrupted conversation with someone without that conversation being interrupted by a text message or phone call. We’re annoyed if we don’t get back text messages back within a few seconds of sending it. The modern day problem of texting and driving is just an extension of the same thing: it’s as if we’re wasting time in the car, merely driving somewhere, when we could be multi-tasking.

I feel badly for those of you who are dating: It used to be that if your boyfriend or girlfriend called on your home phone or dorm phone and you suspected it was him or her and didn’t feel like talking, you just didn’t answer it, pretending you weren’t there. Occasional distance is sometimes good for relationships. But with cell phones or texting, if you don’t answer, he or she knows you’re just ignoring the call. So you’re always “on call. “

None of this is healthy, really. Dr. Noah will tell you it’s not just that we all go to bed too late. It’s that we sleep with our cell phones on, that before we’ve gone to bed we’ve likely spent hours in front of computer screens, and that the light from those screens resets our body clocks so that even when we lay down to rest we lay there wired up, unable to fall asleep quickly. The quality of our sleep has diminished in this country, which is why sleep doctors like Dr. Noah have such successful practices.

Experts say we can do some practical things to improve both the quality and quantity of our sleep, and I pass these on to you:

• First, about an hour before going to bed, we should stay away from computers, cell phones, and all other forms of “blue light” that prevents our bodies from secreting melatonin, the sleep hormone.  Experts suggest reading a book instead.

• Second, we should sleep in bedrooms that are pitch black. Our bodies respond to light, and light prolongs our natural drowsiness.

• Third, cut down on coffee and the so called "power drinks", especially in the afternoon or later.  Marketers are clever to call these “energy” drinks, as if they give us some sort of secret power that will give us the edge up on our competitors. But really, they’re mostly just liquid caffeine and sugar that give us a temporary high before we crash. 

• Fourth, try to even out the peaks and valleys between weekends and weekdays. The problem with staying up until 3 a.m. and sleeping until 3 p.m. on weekends is that our body clocks reset to these times, making Monday and Tuesday mornings almost useless to us because our bodies are telling us we should be asleep at those times. If you’re an athlete and want to perform at your best for a Monday or Tuesday game, the best thing you can do is try and keep a similar schedule on Saturday and Sunday mornings, waking up at mid-morning, perhaps, but not allowing your clocks to reset entirely.

• Fifth, we should spend time outdoors each day, preferably getting some exercise. If you’re a member of the cross-country team, you’re set. But a lot of us spend the entirety of our lives indoors, walking back and forth to the car at most. Our bodies need the natural light to regulate our sleep cycles.

• Finally—and I know how hard this is—we should simply make ourselves go to bed earlier. When I went to college, I used to pull all-nighters before big tests, but after a year of mediocre performances, I started studying less the night before and going to bed earlier, with better results. The truth is, we’re not studying very efficiently past 11 p.m. anyway—whatever we may gain after midnight probably doesn’t make up for what we will lose from our lack of alertness the next morning.  If you want to do well on tests—including the ACT and SAT—give yourself eight hours or so on the TWO nights leading up to that test.

Sleep is NOT a luxury.  It’s how we regenerate. It’s how God made us. There's nothing better than putting our head down at night on a soft, fluffy pillow and allowing ourselves to slowly drift away. Why we fight bringing ourselves to that point, I don't know. But let's fight it less! 

This We Believe: Pope John Paul II High School

We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal, that they endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted among men to protect these rights and derive these powers from the consent of the governed.

All successful organizations begin with founding principles—with unshakeable, unalterable truths that give it vision and life.

In simplest terms—here are the truths we seek to uphold at JPII:

• We believe students are children of God, and this fills us with optimism about what they are capable of achieving and the kind of people they are capable of becoming.

• We believe that young people flourish when they are encouraged to explore the full breadth of possibilities for their lives: intellectually, spiritually, artistically, and athletically. In this belief, we take inspiration from our namesake, John Paul II, who was a scholar, poet, linguist, outdoorsman, playwright, actor and writer. We hope that this renaissance vision will inspire students to seek full lives, marked by curiosity, a love of learning, and a willingness to try new things.

• We believe that the goal of education is not inward but outward, aimed at building a more just world, redeemed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. The imperative of our faith is to love and to serve others. Though our test scores are excellent, the measure of our school’s success isn’t a test score or A.P. result, but whether our students leave JPII predisposed to make a positive difference in their families, churches and communities. 

The Declaration of Independence concludes with these stirring words: "And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on Divine Providence for protection, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. " 

With firm reliance on Divine Providence, may we, too, honor the principles we seek to uphold. 

Referees--Who Needs Them?

This is Mr. Weber's talk to students on Tuesday, September 25, 2012.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the controversy in the National Football League: The NFL referees are on strike, so they’ve imported “replacement referees” for the first three weeks of the season.  These are referees who come from much lesser leagues—lower than DI in college—and the speed and complexity of the NFL game is really beyond many of them. Each week, their refereeing seems to get worse and worse and people get angrier and angrier. Just ask a Packer's fan. 

In last night's game between Seattle and Green Bay,  Golden Tate, JPII class of 2007, went up for a jump ball with a Green Bay defender and the two of them landed in the end zone as time expired.  It appeared initially that the Green Bay defender had control of the ball for an interception, but the refs ruled simultaneous possession--touchdown Golden Tate, giving Seattle a 14-12 victory. It was an amazing play by Golden, but it was a controversial ruling. If you watch ESPN these next couple of days, you’ll see that play over and over again as pundits talk about how the NFL brand is being ruined by referees who aren’t up to par.  And because no one trusts the refs, almost every decision is mistrusted, every close call is challenged, everything is going to instant replay, slowing down the game. It’s a little hard to watch, really. One of the announcers, John Gruden, said that the game "left a bad taste in his mouth.”

There’s a parable in all this, I think. We need rules. We need someone to delineate “right” or “wrong,” and to speak plainly and confidently about those things.  As Americans, we tend to recoil against people telling us things are right or wrong, because we want to be "free". “Who are you to tell me—mind your own business!” is our kind of knee jerk reaction. But it turns out that when we reject rules, or when there is no one to adequately articulate them, or when we don't respect the people making them, the whole thing turns into a horrible mess.

A simple thought experiment:  If there were no traffic lights, no stop signs, no “rules of the road,” if it were every man for himself, would it take us shorter or longer to get where we're going?

Much slower, I think, because at every intersection, we’d have to negotiate with the other driver which of us had right of way. The fact that we have a mutual consensus that a green light means go allows us to confidently pass through without slowing down. By agreeing to rules, we are MORE free as drivers to get where we are going.

Just like the NFL, we need good referees.  We need institutions like the Church to articulate right from wrong. We need governments to establish principled positions and enforce laws consistently. If every decision, every action is subject to debate, life becomes intolerably contentious. We need God’s law to govern us, as seen through natural law and divine revelation. When we follow those laws, we are freer to be ourselves, more secure in our relationships with others, able to live fuller, happier lives. 

A wise rabbi once said: "Keep the commandments, and they will keep you.”