The Lorax

Today, we watched “The Lorax” by Dr. Seus in Environmental Studies 1010. How adorable; much like the rest of the curriculum. Not that I dislike the picture book, and I remember sitting down and watching the animated video all the way through some months ago when I should have been doing homework. In certain contexts, the video would be strikingly appropriate, but I did not feel that way this morning.

Perhaps I am frustrated because I feel that my class is at least half-full of little once-lers, paying no real heed to the message of the class, a message quite like that of the lorax. Unfortunately, I fear it is being communicated just as ineffectively here as in the picture book and that my classmates are no less determined to chop down every last trufula tree than they were when the semester began. Stocks are up! Let’s keep biggering!

I write this as a final tantrum, finally admitting to my true feelings about how I have been spending my time lately. I woke up today to complete the assignment in our cute little lab manual. The entire thing asked us to jump from webpage to webpage, writing down some specific piece of information. Some of the pages didn’t actually exist anymore, although really the whole thing would likely have moved more quickly if I had Googled each question individually.

But you’re supposed to read the articles and learn from them!

That’s not what I was asked to do. If you want me to read about ozone in the troposphere, why don’t you just assign me articles to read about it? Why, you could even put the information you want me to know in the textbook itself! Why have me jump from place to place, regurgitating information like I did in middle school from articles written at a third grade reading level? The real reason, Professor, that students complain when you assign us readings from scientific journals and ask us to synthesize information in an academic essay is that you, not the rest of the system, have lulled us into expecting assignments like what I completed this morning. Why are you surprised, or even disappointed?

As for class today, “The Lorax,” is a well-written story. We’re all familiar with it, a small fuzzy man speaking out against the greedy onceler and his thneed business. We have all heard the refrain, “I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!”

And the class just sits there as our professor explains that we should take notes because it has to do with class.

Yes! Yes, “The Lorax” is a call to action! And that’s exactly what this class is missing. By this point in the semester, this moment when we have covered every topic in the manual and theoretically have a sound information base in all sorts of environmental issues, the story of the Lorax might just be exactly what ought to tie it all together. Now that you know, now that you see how all of this is connected, take care of that last trufula seed! What? The Lorax is a fictional character? Then it is YOUR job to speak for the trees.

But it has instead become just one more exam item, as if there were any point in testing anyone on “The Lorax.” And when the class was over we all began asking straightforward questions about when assignments are due and how we might weasel out of them. And the tiny little Lorax, he and his message are forgotten.

More Thoughts on Sleep, Inspired by Justin Locke

I've neglected to write any more about sleep since my initial post on the subject, but I was reading Justin Locke's blog just now and was reminded that I really ought to. The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the human body and mind works.

Justin Locke wrote about the mistake which is the eight-hour workday. He used the model of a symphony orchestra to demonstrate that in a creative, thought intensive, work environment, more than 25 hours a week just doesn't work. You cannot be creative without rest. You cannot give the same intensity into anything without rest. You cannot accomplish as much without rest. The long hours, the extra time, the deliriousness and the agony, it's all for nothing. It is harmful, not only to you, but to the work that you are doing.

That point cannot be driven in hard enough. It's so counter to the philosophy from which we craft every single day, that really believing and living by the lesson is near impossible. I say this from the perspective, once again, of a student. High school students are taught that on top of school, they must participate in extracurricular activities, give back to the community with community service, complete their homework, and sometimes even work a job on top of that. Then the teachers wonder why we're falling asleep at our desks. But there's nothing we can do about it. Worse, I am speaking for an affluent school district that performs beautifully on standardized tests, a model for the nation. So if someone from elsewhere in the nation, or someone nearby at a less privileged school district, is saying "that's not how things are at all," the heads and tails of it is that this is how the powers that be feel things are supposed to be. The students getting into the top tier universities are the ones who work themselves to death and scorn rest most harshly. I wonder, how long until they burn out?

But I go to two schools; that's how I'm interning at ProMusica Chamber Orchestra today. And I have recently come to appreciate the one aspect that used to make me doubt the program: a lacking of rigor. I never minded that the classes were innovative and unique, but I felt that students at the main campuses were pressed harder to do more homework. I felt they had to stress more over tests. I thought more material was covered. But now I wonder. I wonder, even if they covered more material, who will remember more of it years from now? I wonder, what good does it do to pass a test? I remember when another Walkabout student mentioned some time ago that she felt that we learn more outside of work than we do working. She marveled at how much time people put throwing themselves into work when most of life happens outside of that. I wonder, do our straight A Harvard bound students ever learn from anything outside of school? They dutifully fulfill the extracurricular activity requirement, but they're still surrounded by students and led by a coach or a teacher. And it's a duty, so it's still work. Along with sleep, our culture could stand to learn to play. But I digress.

One of the methods used by cults on new recruits to reel them in is sleep deprivation. People are herded into a summer camp like setting and kept active for long hours for little break. People don't question as much without sleep. Indoctrination is much easier in this setting. Just what are our schools anyway? We don't need to crank out cookie cutter factory workers anymore. What we need are independent, individual, creative minds. That's exactly what we lose when we deprive our children of sleep. It would be oh so easy to claim some malicious scheme of our education system of indoctrination and brainwashing, but I know too many teachers too intimately to believe any such thing. Nevertheless, that is the problem on its face: if you listen to anyone talk about the future of education, you will hear a call for high powered minds that think creatively. If we want that, we can't just stuff kids full of knowledge. That doesn't do the job. We need to let them think. And to do that, we have to let them sleep.

As I Surrender Unto Sleep

Before I post up my Thursday journal or even start to contemplate writing about the two auditions I just finished today and yesterday, I would like to talk about sleep. Utne Reader did an article about sleep loss recently that I read in the hotel last night, and I realized that I have a fair bit to say on this topic. In fact, I've started to plan a whole cycle of blogs on the issue. So let's talk about sleep.

"The evening hangs beneath the moon/a silver thread on darkened dune…"/with crossing eyes and nodding head/I fear that sleep will take me soon.

What is it that makes modern American culture so badly disposed to rest? As a teen, I must speak specifically to and of teens, but Utne's article made me realize the problem is more widespread. We live in a mechanized world where everything can go and go and go nonstop, so guilt seizes us when we take a break or slip into daydream. We cheat ourselves of sleep, trying to get still more work done when our bodies scream at us to stop. Instead of listening, we fill ourselved with caffeine, take shots of ginseng, and eventually catch Z's at completely inappropriate times because at last we cannot stay awake any longer.

It's sad, I know people who boast of their sleep deprivation—I have been among them. Indeed, I find that one of the easiest ways to find common sympathy with someone I've never met is to comment on how tired I am. We can complain together for a considerable length of time and in fact may be able to think of little else. But students take on all kinds of activities, work jobs, and then try to do homework on top of it. Then there's that pesky part where we actually have to get to school. Generally accepted among high-caliber students is the simple fact that sleep is simply secondary to everything else we must do. Somewhere along the line, priorities have been misplaced and confused and this rather terrifying phenomenon is enforced by THE SYSTEM. Anyone who regularly goes to bed before 11:00 is probably a filthy slacker. Sure enough, no one maintains that kind of sleep schedule and succeeds in the full course load of AP and enriched classes that make up the religion of a certain brand of student, a religion to which I have never fully been able to give up myself.

This attitude does not mean that we have not been told many a time how much sleep we "should" get, but we only smirk disdainfully at these numbers. How do you expect, Mrs. Useless Health Teacher, us to find the time to do that? What a notion! And truly, to point your finger and say, "you aren't getting enough sleep!" is utterly pointless: we know! You may as well tell the woman who has had a tracheotomy that it's not healthy to smoke through the hole in her neck. Oh sure, identifying the problem is the first step to solving it, but much more telling than any scientific studies are the very real symptoms we fight off every day.

Then again, I don't think students really appreciate the harm we're doing to ourselves. I'd like to point out a couple tidbits, one from the Utne article and another from a psychiatrist who spoke to my health class about drugs. The psychiatrist explained at one point that sleep is when information is moved from short-term to long-term memory. For me, that was a powerful piece of news. Who would have thought that sleeping might actually do just as much good, if not more, than studying? Think about it—a friend of mine notorious for working herself past human limits continually trumpets her inability to memorize information. Your short-term memory can only hold so much information. If you want something to stay learned, you're going to have to sleep.

The second point didn't actually particularly surprise me—I've long wondered if that weren't partially true—although I should say as a disclaimer that it's still in the "scientists think" stage as opposed to "scientists have found" or "scientists now know." But it turns out that depression may be a symptom of sleep deprivation instead of depression causing sleep loss. The implications of this are striking. After all, depression is a huge problem in teens right now, without guarantee of successful treatment and a deadly streak. As a society, we can't take that information too seriously. It is a sign that the entire attitude of our culture towards sleep and rest needs a giant shift.