I’m a tutor, and I’ve noticed that when students get less sleep they make many more minor mistakes (like dropping a negative sign) and don’t learn as well. This effect is strong enough that for a couple of students I started guessing how much sleep they got the last couple days at the end of sessions, asked them, and was almost always right. Also, I’ve tried at one point going on a significantly reduced sleep schedule with a consistent wakeup time, and effectiveness collapsed. I soon burned out and had to spend most of a day napping to catch up on sleep.
At this point I do think enough sleep is important, and have a different hypothesis that needed sleep is just different for different people.
Anecdotal, but similar—when I used to play in chess tournaments, I had a sense that I performed better and made fewer errors when I had more sleep, to the point of aiming for 9 or so hours of sleep the night before a tournament.
Yep, if someone was majorly undersleeping for a few days, they are probably going to be more sleepy and make more mistakes of attention/find it more difficult to concentrate and absorb the kind of information that they would need a tutor to absorb!
As an experiment—you can ask a couple of your students to take a coffee heading to you when they are underslept and see if they continue to make mistakes and learn poorly (in which case it’s the lack of sleep per se likely causing problems) or not (in which case it’s sleepiness)
I’m a tutor, and I’ve noticed that when students get less sleep they make many more minor mistakes (like dropping a negative sign) and don’t learn as well. This effect is strong enough that for a couple of students I started guessing how much sleep they got the last couple days at the end of sessions, asked them, and was almost always right. Also, I’ve tried at one point going on a significantly reduced sleep schedule with a consistent wakeup time, and effectiveness collapsed. I soon burned out and had to spend most of a day napping to catch up on sleep.
At this point I do think enough sleep is important, and have a different hypothesis that needed sleep is just different for different people.
Anecdotal, but similar—when I used to play in chess tournaments, I had a sense that I performed better and made fewer errors when I had more sleep, to the point of aiming for 9 or so hours of sleep the night before a tournament.
Yep, if someone was majorly undersleeping for a few days, they are probably going to be more sleepy and make more mistakes of attention/find it more difficult to concentrate and absorb the kind of information that they would need a tutor to absorb!
As an experiment—you can ask a couple of your students to take a coffee heading to you when they are underslept and see if they continue to make mistakes and learn poorly (in which case it’s the lack of sleep per se likely causing problems) or not (in which case it’s sleepiness)