Notes from the desk Let's talk about 8am classes

Author: Sonja Pedersen-Green

For the second time in my Middlebury career, I am enrolled in an 8 a.m. class. Having taken a class at a similarly unreasonable hour abroad, where instead of walking for 20 minutes, I rode a bus for an hour to get to class, I assumed 8 a.m. really wouldn't be that early. I was wrong.

The difference between my early morning abroad classroom experience, for which I was coherent and alert, and my Middlebury early morning experience, for which I am neither awake nor alert, comes down to one problem: It's nearly impossible to get to bed at a reasonable hour with Middlebury's workload. I can count on one hand the number of times I have been able to get to bed before 12 a.m., and they all involve serious illness. Usually my bedtime falls sometime between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m., meaning I sleep between four and six hours. That's not healthy.

My early morning walk to Twilight on Tuesdays and Thursdays is humorous. I have on occasion stumbled into Warner, forgetting that it's not 2:50 p.m. on Monday, and I'm not on my way to Macro Theory. I'm not even awake enough to know where I am, let alone to learn.

I know I'm not the only one with this lack of sleep problem, either. Looking around the room in my 8 a.m., I can tell that most people are also sleep deprived. This benefits no one. When a professor teaches students who have slept almost half the suggested amount, and students need to learn when they have slept so little, no one gains anything from the classroom experience.

While the administration cites the need to utilize classroom resources as the primary reason for 8 a.m. classes, what they seem to misunderstand is that when students are not awake, the College is not utilizing its resources well at all. The principle goal of any college is to educate its students. When students are not awake enough to learn, no one wins. I can attest to the fact that I learn substantially less in my 8 a.m. class than I do in my other classes, simply because I'm not awake enough to process the information well. It's time to abolish 8 a.m. classes. If students are too sleepy to learn, then the College, the students and the professors all lose.