Students,

Hope you are all enjoying your snowday/day off!

Today, I expect you all to take some time out your day and do some work on your project. I expect for all of you to do some background research as well as as brainstorm the sources for your project.

• Complete background research on your topic
  • I'm looking for specific references to actual policy (be it Federal, State or Local)
  • Statistics and primary sources
• List of Sources (includes those affected by policies, list of experts)
  • I expect a list of 3 people you will be interviewing. Send along the contact information for those sources and explain why you would be interviewing them

We will presenting your findings in the morning, however I expect that you leave a comment under this discussion with your work! Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Leave me a comment with your questions!

Stay warm,

Faiza

Parents and Students in Seattle have been pushing towards the goal of changing the start times of certain public schools for multiple reasons. First off, the commute for many students was a hassle. Many students had to wake up much earlier than necessary just to get to school on time. A Seattle public school parent who had been interviewed by John Higgins, a Seattle Times education editor said that her child had to wake up at 5:30 for an 8 a.m. start time.

According to the sleep experts at the sleep foundation,  “Teens are among those least likely to get enough sleep; while they need on average 9 1/4 hours of sleep per night for optimal performance, health and brain development, teens average fewer than 7 hours per night...”

Teen sleep has been a study that has been going on for some time now. We are finally coming to the results that teens need more sleep than they are actually receiving. With all of the extracurricular activities, homework, social events and everything in between, it is really hard for us teens to get the sleep that we actually need. Homework

Obviously it is very important to get a good nights sleep but now we know how serious the effects of being sleep deprived for too long actually are. Now, more and more studies are revealing how being sleep deprived for too long can seriously screw up your sleeping pattern, cause in more fatigue, mood swings, and more importantly, a noticeable decline in students effort and work.

The way this campaign works is that we would pass a bill that would make it so that teens could get the required sleep they need. The bill would eliminate homework, and making longer school days, and making class start a hour later so that when teens get to school they can eat breakfast and relax before class starts.

The problems that we faced was working with the audio, and uploading it to the site. We had trouble because the audio needed to be a youtube video, but we kept on working and figured it out. We came up with this idea because teen sleep is a big problem all over the untied states and it has affected kids all over and caused high drop out rates and other issues like being unsucessful, so making a campaign would help alot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEm3HZAVlz0

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/interpreting-the-data-10-ways-to-teach-math-and-more-using-infographics/#more-141705

Student Contest--Write a Rap

Rules:

• Pick a story that interests you from one of the NYT sections
• The rap should be original and must not include profanity or vulgar language
• The rap should be 16-18 lines
• It’s fine to focus on a smaller topic found within a section in The Times. For example, you can write a rap based on just the government shutdown rather than the whole range of national or political news this year. Or, you might focus on 2013 movies rather than covering other news from the Arts section. But you should also feel free to include as many, and as wide a range, of news stories from a particular section as you like
• Example 1
• Example 2
• Rubric
• How to create your rap guide