Rm404, 4/F
Carmel Building
123 Happy Road
Tseung Kwan O
N.T.
4th October, 2017
Ms Ng Miu Yee
Principal
Carmel Secondary School
55 Chung Han Street
Homantin
Kowloon
Dear Miss Ng，
Recently, the best school start time for Carmel has been frequently discussed. I am going to share my view on the topic with you. In my opinion, the school start time for Carmel should be delayed because of a few reasons.
Delaying the school start time can give students a longer sleeping time, which is important to their health and study. Sleep is very important to people, especially teenagers. However, most of the students nowadays sleep at around midnight or even later. Sometimes, we go to bed late because of the heavy workload but sometimes it is really difficult for us to fall asleep. Some would say teenagers should form the habit of keeping early hours. In fact, there is a research which shows that young people’s sleeping time is delayed. In other words, they are still awake before 11 o’clock at night. If students have to go to school before 8 o’clock, their maximum sleeping time will be 7 hours, which is much less than the sleeping time they need. A lack of sleep makes students feel tired and sleepy in the morning. This may be the reason why we always ‘act like sloths’ in the first lesson. Moreover, it will damage our health and affect our growth at the same time. Delaying the school start time lets students sleep for a longer time and can help alleviate their health problem. Also, it will definitely increase the learning efficiency and improve the learning atmosphere as students are more energetic because of sufficient sleep.
Delaying the school start time benefits student who live far away from school. Those who live in Tseung Kwan O or Tuen Mun have to travel for one hour or even longer to go to school. It is easy for them to be late. And every morning, they wake up and prepare for school hastily and many of them even need to rush out of their home only 10 minutes after waking up. When people are in a hurry, they forget things. Thus, delaying the school start time may decrease situations such as forgetting the homework or the textbook.
In addition, delaying the school start time can make more students have breakfast. Many students skip breakfast in the morning because they have no time to enjoy it. And there is a more important reason: they do not have appetite for food because it is too early. Thus most students will just give up having breakfast. If the school start time is delayed, the problem can be improved tremendously. Students will enjoy having breakfast, which is important to their brain development and effective in improving their learning effectiveness.
Those are my opinions about the best school start time for Carmel. Hope you could consider my suggestion of delaying the school start time.
Yours sincerely,
Sharon Song
Sharon Song