The following is an entry from my CiViL Groups Log on September 22, 2004. All names have been changed to protect privacy.
Stressed Out
Kareem is tired. His schedule is pretty brutal. He has to be in school at 7:15 a.m., which means he has to get up before 6 a.m. to be ready to catch the bus by 6:30. After school he has football practice until 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. He goes home, takes a shower, and eats dinner. Then he does his homework for at least an hour. After that, he gets on the phone to talk to friends, girls. It’s a social time for him, and it’s very important to him. By the time he’s done talking on the phone, it can be after midnight. Kareem works all day Saturday for the Metro Park Service. He’s one of the referee’s for their youth football league. On Sunday he sleeps all day, trying to catch up on his sleep before the next week starts.
Tired
Needless to say, Kareem is not getting enough sleep. Kareem is a typical American in this respect. Most of us get less sleep than we need, and we think we can manage ok on four or five hours of sleep. We catch up on sleep when we can, usually on weekends, but, like Kareem, we find it difficult to maintain a lifestyle that includes a good night’s sleep. We’re just too busy for that.
The Crash
Kareem says he’s “off” spiritually. When I asked him what it would mean to be “on,” he says, “Going to church on Sundays.” Due to his overwhelming schedule he can’t go to church. He needs Sundays to catch up on sleep. If he doesn’t do it then, he will crash during the week. Actually, he crashes during the week anyway. Like a lot of boys who live this way, Kareem falls asleep in class on a regular basis. When he does that, it affects his grades. He misses lectures and in-class assignments. He fails to get work done at school and has to take it home. He spends more home-time doing homework and ends up going to bed later than he might, and that causes him to be sleepier in class the next day.
A lot of boys think they can skip sleep and be ok. Maybe they can. Their bodies are young and resilient. They may not feel the fatigue that I feel when I’ve had a poor night sleep. Their youthful illusion of immortality (read, “underdeveloped cerebral cortex”) might keep them from believing they are burning the candle at both ends, but Kareem is proof that they are.
Choices
So what does Kareem’s sleep schedule have to do with character education? Apparently it has a lot to do with it. If good character is just good choices made over time, it’s pretty clear that Kareem’s sleep deprivation is leading him away from good character. By sleeping through church he has abandoned the routine that makes him feel “well” spiritually. And by falling asleep in class, he is threatening his own well-being academically. It’s only a matter of time until sleep deprivation becomes a problem in some of his relationships or on the football field.
Taking Charge
I wonder at what point Kareem will decide to take charge of his schedule in order to get enough sleep? It took me until I was in my thirties to even think about it, and I was in my mid forties when I finally mastered it. Teenagers and college students seem to go for long periods without sleep in a kind of binge and purge of sleep deprivation and sleeping in. Eventually the demands of jobs and parenthood force us to adapt to the schedules of others. Maybe experience helps out. After ten or twenty years of staying up all night, most people recognize that it’s not that big a deal. Feeling good the next day becomes a higher priority.
Saying No
None of that matters to Kareem right now. The issue for him is more practical. What does he want to do to make his schedule work a little better? Right now, he seems to be willing to sleep on Sunday, even though is makes him feel unsettled spiritually. But he recognizes the cost of sleeping in class. He says he will stop doing that, but he doesn’t know how. He won’t be able to change that problem unless he addresses the underlying issue that drives the whole thing. The real issue isn’t that Kareem isn’t sleeping enough. That’s just a symptom. The real issue is that Kareem isn’t able to say no. His overwhelming schedule dominates his life. It controls him. It should be the other way around. He should control it. Right now, he doesn’t understand that he can solve his own problem by saying no to something. He doesn’t want to do that, of course, but he can. He will have to do it soon.
Limits
Life has limits, and time is one of the toughest. You just can’t create more of it. Kareem wants to cram a lot of great things into his week, but they don’t all fit. Right now, sleep is the thing he is doing without. At some point, he will have to choose to limit something else in order to get enough sleep. It may seem like a trivial thing, but it’s not. It’s the kind of choice that good or bad character is made out of. Kareem isn’t making the best choices right now, but he’s beginning to see that he will have to.
Little Things Matter
Getting enough sleep seems like a little thing. So does setting priorities and limits. In the years that I’ve worked with boys in CiViL Groups I’ve seen “little” issues devastate whole lives. Boys who can’t keep from falling asleep in class often fail that class. Because they fail that class, they don’t graduate. Because they don’t graduate, they join the social underclass that works for minimum wage jobs or resorts to criminal ways to make their living. There are a lot of “little” choices in that downward spiral, but each one of them is important. Teenagers want to believe they are ready to run their own lives, but they often need coaching on the “little” things that can ruin their chances to do well. Today Kareem and I started that process. We are not finished yet. It’s an ongoing conversation.