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Friday, April 23, 2004
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TO: Alliance Members FROM: Janice, of course (see below, and other places on UD) SUBJECT: Intro Sleep Okay, okay, okay, hear me out please. I have an idea - truly an original idea - about university curricular reform. It came to me when I read the following item from Yahoo News: [Duke University] is ...considering new orientation programs this fall that would help freshmen understand the importance of sleep. "Generally, the people I know, we don't see sleep as that important compared to what school and the curriculum have to offer," said Marcel Yang, a Duke freshman from Chapel Hill. You've read about this, right? Duke is discontinuing 8 AM classes because no students take them because everyone is sleeping off late nights and interrupted sleep patterns and all-night last-minute study sessions, etc. But rather than merely change the university's schedule, Duke is venturing into the wellness field. It'll be lecturing its students on good sleeping habits and maybe even doing personal health assessments for each of them. Which is great. Actions speak louder than words, however, and for this reason I would like to propose the following: Remember when you were in kindergarten, and how at around midday your teacher would give everybody a blanket and put comfy mats on the floor and dim the lights and you'd have naptime? Don't the very words I've used to evoke this memory make you weak with nostalgia? That's because life was simpler then, and school was not just a place where you were lectured to. It was a place that cared. Recall the Duke student's remark up there: "[We] don't see sleep as that important compared to what school and the curriculum have to offer." Well, why are school and the curriculum at odds with sleep in the first place? How did sleep get banished to the world outside of school? What I'm proposing is a required first-semester freshman orientation course at around ten in the morning every morning that would in essence be a version of naptime. Freshmen would be issued blankets, and comfy pads would be scattered about. Soft music (Brahms?) would be piped in and perhaps the professor/sleep facilitator would lead the group in a little directed meditation as everyone dropped off. As I conceive it, this course will not work unless it is a regular part of the university curriculum for all students, not merely freshmen. Every morning, every year, students would gather in darkened classrooms for full-credit courses in going to sleep. How would students earn their credits? Basically, they would be asked to read - on their own time or in class as they dropped off to sleep - sleep-oriented novels. For instance: Oblomov Swann's Way Mrs Dalloway Call It Sleep The Big Sleep They would then be asked to write a paper about the cultural representations of sleep in these novels, etc. Pedagogically, this kind of focused group meditation on and enactment of sleep would both make up for missed hours of sleep and train students in relaxation and sleep techniques. At the same time, students would collectively ponder the meanings of sleep as these are suggested in a variety of important novels. I haven't worked out all the details of this requirement, but I really think it's an eye-opener!! Love, Janice |