Last week’s Friday Foto featured a student falling asleep over school work. That got me thinking about sleeping, school, and culture.
During the 16 years I (Anamaria) spent going to school in Romania, I never saw any students fall asleep in class. I never heard of any either.
But during the 6 years I have lived in the U.S., I’ve heard numerous stories of students who fall asleep in the classroom.
The stories tend to be slightly different, depending on who tells them: if the story of the sleeping student comes from one of my U.S. American colleagues, the tone of the story is one of amusement and, at the same time, resignation (e.g. one should expect this of American students).
If the story comes from an international teacher…well, its tone will be quite different. Most international teachers teaching in the U.S. are not amused in the slightest by sleeping students, as they find this behavior highly disrespectful.
So, I ask myself: why is it that some cultures seem to tolerate this behavior, and others don’t?
Could this have anything to do with culture? I am convinced it does.
Students are more likely to slouch in their seats, or fall asleep in class in individualistic cultures, such as the U.S. In these cultures, the student is considered to be existentially equal to the teacher (the teacher is in a way the student’s friend).
In collectivist societies, where the relationship between the students and their teachers is much more formal, slouching or sleeping in class would be considered highly disrespectful, and is hardly ever done.
What would happen if a student from a collectivist culture did fall asleep in class? Well, in Romania, this could potentially lead to a low conduct grade (”conduct” is listed as a separate entry, just like any subject, in the Romanian students’ grade books).
Question: What would happen in your country if a student fell asleep in the classroom? Does any other country, besides Romania, have a “conduct grade”?
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In Argentina it is also consider something really disrespectful. If a student decides to fall asleep in class it would probably be done on purpose, as a sign of disrespect and a challenge to the teacher, defying their authority. Teachers would definitely take it into consideration for the student’s grade, but it wouldn’t be under “conduct” since we’re no longer allowed to fail a student based on their behavior. It would be under “lack of classroom participation” which means that the student was not engaged in the learning activity.
I am thinking that in Argentina students also have no excuse or time to fall asleep; we are in school only 5 hours per day, and take 2 breaks during that time; if a student is tired sometimes teachers in the US might not be that severe because students spend more than 9 hours involved in school activities, if we count waiting for the bus to pick them up and return them to their homes.
Coming back to the students’ attitudes behind falling asleep in class, I wonder what American students feel or think about falling asleep in class. Do they think is OK? Or do they know it is not OK but do it because teachers don’t mind? Hmmmm…cultural questions….
When I saw the photo of the sleeping child, it made me chuckle and think back to the times I almost – or actually did! – fall asleep in school. Of course, this wasn’t allowed but I got away with it several times. It was pretty easy. With my elbows on the desk, I’d rest my head in my hands and pretend to read my textbook. I’d close my eyes and sleep for a few minutes. I don’t remember being afraid I’d get into trouble if I got caught snoozing — I was definitely more afraid of getting caught passing notes or not having my homework finished.
I didn’t dare sleep in class when I was an exchange student in Germany. Our desks were configured in a “U” shape, instead of rows, so we all faced each other and the teacher. It was impossible to hide in class. I also remember that students didn’t slouch on their desks as much as we did at my U.S. school. But in Germany we were only in school until noon or 1pm and that was the year I started drinking coffee!
When I became a teacher I had to content with sleepy students. At the college level it seemed like students felt it was their right to sleep (or read the newspaper or do other homework) because they were paying for the class. At the high school level, students seem to feel like it’s the teacher’s responsibility to engage/entertain them enough so that they don’t have a chance to get sleepy.
How do current teachers deal with sleepy/sleeping students?
In the US, I think it’s a matter of home discipline, as well. Parents don’t make kids go to sleep at a reasonable time and they don’t feed them properly in the morning. Plus in these times attention spans are shorter and additionally I don’t think kids here are taught much self-discipline by the schools.
I’m an American high school (9th grade to 12th grade) senior (12th grade). I know that the freshman, sophomore, junior, senior titles aren’t usually used in other countries but anyways… I was reading over this and thought that I’d be able to provide a little insight. Yes American students sleep in school. ALL THE TIME! It’s not uncommon and it’s not looked at as disrespectful. See my school day is normally 7 hours long. I wake up at 5am and I get home at 3pm. I don’t do any sports etc. so imagine how long it is for my brother who wakes up at 5 and gets home at 10 pm from sports. THEN! we have homework… hours of it. See students are desperately trying to make room for their social life and so they end up staying late either out with friends or talking to them online, so we end up getting anywhere from 6 -> 4 hours of sleep a night.
That said, the teachers at our school know we’re over-worked and over-tired so if we happen to fall asleep in class, they send us down to the nurse to take a nap because they know that it’s not a lack of respect, but simply a lack of necessary energy. Focusing in a classroom where every other student is silent and the teacher is talking about something you can’t seem to be interested in makes the perfect scenario for sleeping. I fall asleep in school every now and then but I usually try not to because I take a lot of pride in my education. If I do decide to sleep I’ll usually sleep during my lunch hour or my study hall hour because then I won’t miss anything.
It’s not like we fall into a deep sleep. It’s a lot more like we close our eyes and let everything just drift away until we’re so relaxed we can’t hear anything anymore.
Like Cate said about feeling like it’s the teacher’s responsibility to energize us. As much as I feel bad for saying it, when you are in school for such a long period of time, it really is. Challenging our brains with random facts is not something we’d choose to do in spare time, so teachers need to look for a way to make it appealing to us so we don’t have a negative outlook on education.
I really appreciate how our school deals with sleeping students. I don’t believe sleeping in school deserves punishment unless it’s done at an important time in class or unless it keeps happening. I’ll admit that we don’t have as much respect for our teachers in America as you do in other countries but I’ve never seen a student fall asleep simply because they don’t respect their teacher.
I work 36 hours a week along with 7 hours a day of school and there’s millions who do the same. We Americans are tired.
In England (where I go to school) you can’t really get away with sleeping in most lessons. I have dozed off in a few, but they were lessons like IT, where the teacher is at their desk and doesn’t notice what you’re doing. It’s not seen as a sign of disrespect,just a lack of sleep. I’ve never heard of anyone in my school going to sleep properly, just nodding off for a few seconds and then jolting awake. I’ve fallen asleep properly in English when watching a video with the lights off, but again the teacher was at his desk and couldn’t see.
Today our 9th grade literacy class read and analyzed Anamaria’s article and one of the accompanying comments (the one by Laura Kaplan). Here were some of the comments and thoughts we had about both the original article and the comment:
One group agreed in general with Laura’s response that U.S. students are too stressed out by all the work they’re given, but disagreed somewhat with the statement that teachers should be responsible for making the lessons interesting. They thought students should be responsible as well. They also commented on the many additional distractions, online and off, that students have: Facebook, AIM, myspace, Hi5, email, texting, MSN, games, YouTube, forums, phone, downloading music.
Another group thought that everybody at some point needs to sleep and students’ daily lives are always busy doing something IMPORTANT! (Caps intended.) That group also made a connection to their own lives, that in general, more activities = less sleep, or sometimes even NO sleep.
A third group did think it was the teachers’ responsibility to energize us, and that teachers don’t really care about anything but their own work, and not students’ outside activities. They liked the fact that the comment was written by a young person who was going through the same experiences as they are.
As I was reading the comments on this post, several other things came to mind.
1. Lee, as I was reading your comment I started to wonder: would students from a collectivist society fall asleep in class, if they knew the teacher could not see them? I cannot speak for all collectivist countries, however, my guess is that, in many of them, the answer to the question above is: “no”. Why? Because, if they did, they would feel shame towards their classmates. Remember our post on collectivism (shame cultures) and individualism (guilt cultures)? Here is a link to it: http://culturallyteaching.com/2009/03/31/i-or-we-how-individual-or-group-orientaion-influences-culturesand-education/
2. The several comments related to the US highlight the fact that, when learning about cultural dimensions, we should not forget that these dimensions are general tendencies, and not absolute truths. This means that individuals within a culture will deviate from them, some more than others. Thank you, everybody, for your comments! We are so happy that you found this post interesting.