I was so exhausted when I came home I fell asleep on the recliner at 6:30 and just got up now at 5:00 AM. I have a ton of homework to do before school I’m going to start on right after this post. I’ve found I have two different times I can fall asleep. Either between 1 and 3 AM, which obviously isn’t good because I need to be up at 7:00 AM for school, or immediately when I get home where I pass out from exhaustion.

One thing I’ve noticed is how much more productive I am when rested. I spent my study halls in school yesterday trying, trying, trying, to get my homework done, but it just wasn’t happening because my mind was so ready to shut down. Now that I actually caught up on a little sleep, it should be a breeze. Knowing this, I don’t even try to fight staying awake when I get home and just make sure to set an alarm so I’m up in time to do my work.

Seeing how important sleep is, I don’t understand how culturally there’s this weird attitude towards it. It’s like we’re supposed to be ashamed of wanting and needing to rest. Every school I’ve ever been to has kids who just don’t naturally get to sleep at a time that’s in line with the school schedule and who suffer for it. I’d go as far to say as a lack of sleep is the primary cause of my failings in school the first time around. There’s tons of evidence to support that teens need a different schedule than what the school system is on.

What’s nice is the principal at my new school gets that, and believes school should start later. We start at 8:15 which is actually pretty late by most high school standards, but still earlier than most any adults jobs start. The problem is for school to start later the entire city school system would have to change their busing times. This is something I’d love to see happen.

Read the link below, it explains it in pretty straightforward terms:

http://www.cehd.umn.edu/pubs/ResearchWorks/sleep.html

NOTE: It’s amazing how much easier it is to write these when the other option is doing homework.  I have no excuse now for not having any of my work done today.

Hi, it’s Jill! Here’s the transcript of a quick little Q&A with Todd. Interview by Josh Rowntree of MSA Sports Network. Can you tell which high school soccer player is Todd in this team photo?

Spanish 1 is still impossible. My mind just does not process foreign languages. The fact that I’m struggling to this extent in a class with all freshmen is all the more humiliating. The effortlessness in which the students minds process the information is mind blowing to me. The teacher tells them a word in Spanish, it goes in their mind, and then comes out whenever they need it. The word goes in my mind, fights a battle with the warring factions in my brain, gets lost around 5 conversations I’m having with myself about 5 different topics, and disappears forever.

“The students were taking part in a roundtable discussion that included comedian Bill Cosby. They said 7:30 a.m. was too early. Bobb agreed to have morning classes start at 8 a.m. by the second semester, which begins Jan. 22.”

This is my buddies and me on my old soccer team back in high school in the 90’s.

The players on my current team at Trinity are really good guys. My friends and I would have made a slobby 33-year-old guy cry if he came to soccer practice. Especially if he was huffing and puffing and was the slowest guy on the team. We would have certainly yelled horrible things.  Going back is hard enough, I don’t think I would be able to survive if everyone was as big of a jerk as I was in high school.

Here I am in the some newspaper in 1994 being recognized with the other National Merit students.  The best and brightest of our school…and me.

I had a 1.7 GPA at the time.

So exhausted from the second day I fell asleep at 7 PM and woke up at 7 AM. Nice to get enough sleep but I didn’t get a chance to cover my Spanish book and was docked points. Que lastima!  Took Paco for my first name.

I’ve been using my dodgeball skills on the soccer field as a goalie. People actually are impressed by the way I can throw the ball and I’ve been teaching the dodgeball throw to the real soccer goalie (who is 1000 times better than me otherwise). It’s cool to have a skill that is good but it was still kind of weird explaining that I knew how to throw well from playing dodgeball 3 times a week.