Well, congratulations students. And parents, teachers, let’s make the second quarter a bit better, shall we?

As I write this, I am staring longingly at my planner, with a date highlighted: October 19. The end of the first quarter. One-fourth of the way through the seemingly endless school year. My eyelids droop from a lack of sleep, and I think about how easy the quarter was. It was, after all, only the first quarter. But then my eyelids close, as if falling asleep, and I realize that’s all I really want to be doing. Sleeping.

A recent study by Brigham Young University shows that high school students test better with seven hours of sleep, which is less than the recommended nine. And while high school students don’t have tests every single day, they still get seven, or less, hours of sleep a night. It accumulates quickly. Within a week, a student can become a zombie, walking around school with no true ideas as to what they’re doing. They’re just following their classmates, doing what they know they’re supposed to be doing without registering it.

But even without the constant, overwhelming urge to sleep, students are still stressed. They’re not sleeping because they have homework, the evil gift from teachers who appear to forget that every other teacher assigns homework too. And yes, perhaps teachers are to blame for this shortage in sleep; they do assign the homework, after all. However, teachers aren’t there when the student actually does the homework. They don’t know where the student is, what music they’re listening to, who interrupts them. Parents do.

In this way, parents are at fault for the lack of sleep in a student’s life. Parents have this way of encouraging their children to do well, to persevere, and to work hard because working hard allows you to succeed in life. It’s a constant voice in the back of a student’s mind, “will this help me get into a good university? Is this worth it? Does this actually matter?” Every student, in the past and present, has had some voice drilled into their minds by those who encourage them. They have someone who urges them to do well, to complete homework, and to study hard. And by studying hard, they mean studying late into the night before a test, cutting into the student’s sleep for the night. It’s a never-ending circle of homework, studying, and closing your eyes for a second, only to open them and find that you’ve slept through your alarm.

And really, that’s not all parents are to blame for. During events such as open house, when parents meet the teachers their children have that year, they learn that their child should only have about three hours of homework a night for every class. This is a lie. Some nights, it’s about three hours of homework for a single class, not to mention the other five or six, at minimum, a student is taking. As a result, some parents interrupt their children — “are you done yet? When will you be done? Are you working hard? Do you need anything? How do you have this much homework? Are you getting too distracted? Are you done yet?”

So, teachers, parents, please work together to give your students and children a healthy life. Sleep is important. We need it desperately to function. We need it for our brains to work properly, to remember things and learn and for all of the studying we’ve done to actually have a purpose. Please don’t take it away.

Here’s to the second quarter: may it be better than the first.