Life's too fast for sleep

When I read the news story about them I had an almost immediate old fart reaction.

Sleep pods at school — come on man. Are you kidding me?

It’s true. The Las Cruces school district has these units that they’ve been using, apparently since 2008. An associate professor in the NMSU nursing school wrote grants to get the $14,000 apiece pods.

It appears they use them in high schools and kids struggling through a bad day can go to the school nurse’s office and check into the pod for a 20-minute power nap in the Jetson-like device that plays music through headphones and shuts out sensory inputs.

This is quite a bit different than when I was in school. Granted, I do recall Mrs. Harmon having us all lay our heads on our desk for 15 minutes after recess. I don’t think many of us took a nap, though. As I recall, it was more an opportunity for booger-picking, desk scribbling, whispering, or doing something silly to make your neighbor laugh and get in trouble.

In junior high I didn’t dare sleep because of the things I witnessed.

Once I saw a kid doze off with his head down on the desk in Mr. Burke’s geography class. Coach Burke lifted the kid, desk and all, a couple feet off the deck and dropped him.

I remember one class in high school where the teacher caught one student snoring away and silently motioned to the rest of the class to follow him out the door, just before the bell. When the bell went off the kid awoke to an empty classroom.

The stories about these sleep pods claim that teens need 9-10 hours of sleep a night but only a third of teens actually even get 8 hours.

I’m pretty sure my average amount of sleep per night as a teen was generally 6-7 hours. Don’t misunderstand, if left to my own devices in the morning I would have snagged that full 10 hours or more each night. I was not left to my own devices, even on weekends, very often.

I didn’t get told when to go to bed too often but I sure got the message when it was time to get up. Covers got jerked off of you in the morning, blazing overhead lights came on, and if that didn’t work, dad brought a glass of ice water down the hall and carefully poured it in whichever ear was available.

If my parents knew I had been out late or stayed up late watching TV or whatever, it was automatically their duty to wake me up three to four hours later to do whatever job needed doing.

Yeah, I’ve got to admit, 20 minutes in a sleep pod would have probably helped me out back then. Come to think of it, 40 years later it would be a nice thing to have in a corner of my office.

Life moves too fast though, I must keep up. Guess I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]