by Mauranda Men ’16, Feature Editor

It began on Monday, September 28^th. The first five-day week of the year. It was long and dreadful; and worst of all, that’s what it’ll be like every week until Thanksgiving. How does that feel?

Although Ms. Speck cheerfully noted that “it’s about time” that we fulfill the school week, I’ve found this opinion to be quite unpopular. Many students and teachers feel very stressed out by having less time to do more work. What, though, do five-day weeks really do to our minds?

Various studies have shown the detrimental effects of too much stress on the brain. Specifically, spending prolonged amounts of time in a stressful environment means consistently elevated levels of the hormone cortisol in the body. The documented consequences range from changes in emotional state to actual neuron death. When they’re stressed, people tend to be more irritable, less sociable, and annoyed by being around others. They also tend to have less effective memorization and comprehension skills, a suggested cause of which is that the cortisol activates the amygdala, the portion of the brain responsible for instinctive threat assessment, and triggers a fear response that may limit the brain’s ability to actually absorb new information. While the scariest effects of stress have mostly been proven only for long-term and extremely stressful life events, it has been suggested by various studies that even short-term stress can inhibit inter-neural connections, restrict the production of neurons, and reduce the volume of grey matter.

No need to freak out about that and run to the spa just yet, though. A deficiency in cortisol can actually be an indication of Addison’s disease and cause severe fatigue and depression.

Fatigue? Exhaustion? Newark Academy students seem to feel that more than ever with more school days in the week. It’s well documented that teenagers should get 8-10 hours of sleep a night, on average, and adults should aim for 7-9. Sleep deprivation isn’t good, of course, as it can interfere with proper cognitive function, memory, motor function, and emotional stability. Although it has yet to actually happen, based on animal experiments, it’s generally believed that prolonged sleep deprivation can kill a person—though said person would probably stop attending school long before that point. Keep in mind, though, that repeated oversleeping also isn’t good for the body or the mind.

Switching from a five-day to a four-day school week has actually been hotly debated, especially in more rural school districts with tighter budgets. The switch to a four-day week has been most popular in rural Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Various studies based on test score have concluded that the switch did not result in any major change in student performance, and may even have improved it. As the Gallup poll above shows, though, most parents are against switching. The most popular arguments against it include a lack of efficiency and preparation for entering higher education or the workforce, where work is at least if not more frequent than five days a week. In case you were hopeful, it should be noted that New Jersey briefly considered switching to four days in the 1970’s, but when budget pressures eased in the later decades, the idea was dropped and never resurfaced. Some schools have done a partial switch, having four-day weeks every other week or only having four-day weeks during the coldest months of winter to save on heating. At Newark Academy, of course, that’s less of an issue.

In some of the studies on four-day weeks, it was found that performance briefly dropped for the first year after the change was implemented and then rose back up to pre-switch levels in the years afterward as the students adapted to the change. If they can do that in Colorado, or South Dakota, we can get back to the five-day swing, right?