Why I Replaced My Old Mattress With A New Casper Box Mattress
Sleep isn't something I really thought about until I moved in with my girlfriend last year. I'd heard that there are different qualities of sleep, but I just never really paid attention to my own patterns. I knew that if I was out late the night before I might be more tired the next day, but that was about it. But when my girlfriend moved in, I started waking up in the middle of the night a lot, because whenever she would move, the mattress would shake and jostle me awake. I tried melatonin and other supplements, but nothing really worked and eventually, I started feeling the effects of poor sleep in my life. I was snapping more easily at work, couldn't concentrate, and just wanted to nap instead of going to the gym when I got home. I told a coworker about my problems, and he told me that I should try a mattress made with memory foam. I thought that sounded unnecessary, and my spring mattress was probably fine. My only real association with memory foam was those old Tempurpedic commercials I used to see when I was a kid, and they seemed super cheesy. Plus it sounded like something that would sink down to much, I just didn't feel like it was for me.
But after seeing a ton of reviews from other people online who said that foam mattresses totally changed their sleep game, I wondered if maybe it was worth the hype. I started comparing brands, and the mattress that seemed to have the most positive reviews was Casper. I had heard of Casper before and knew it was a leader in the bed-in-a-box space. Sometimes things are popular for a reason, so I went online to see what made Casper different. I found out that their mattresses are made with several layers of foam to make them comfy and supportive, breathable material to keep you cool, and best of all they are motion transfer resistant so I won't feel my girlfriend if she moves in the middle of the night. Ding ding ding! Ok, they did call out my biggest issue, but I still just wasn't sure it would actually make a difference. But, they have a 100-night free trial, so I figured I had nothing to lose and ordered a Queen sized mattress.
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The mattress arrived in a box so the delivery guy could just leave it in front of my building without a problem. It was light enough that I could carry it up the stairs by myself and didn't have to hire movers, which I liked. I opened the box and uncurled the mattress onto my frame. It started inflating immediately, and it was really cool to see it puff up like magic! The whole process was so convenient, which makes a big difference to me as a busy person. When we went to sleep that first night, my girlfriend loved how comfortable it was, but I knew the real test would come after she fell asleep. When my alarm went off the next morning, I had slept through the night for the first time since my girlfriend moved in! I was so glad that the motion transfer resistant material actually worked because I was starting to worry about what my lack of sleep would mean for our relationship.
Over the next few weeks, I noticed a few more perks of our
Casper: I really was staying cooler, and wasn't waking up a little sweaty. Plus, because the mattress is engineered for good neck and spine alignment, I felt less creaky and stiff and was moving around more freely when I went to the gym. Most of all, I started actually appreciating the soft and comfortable foam whenever we'd watch Netflix in bed on the weekends. Now that I've experienced the energy and mood lift that comes with a good night's sleep, I'm never going back. I wish I had gotten a Casper when I lived on my own, so I could have appreciated good sleep for all it's worth back then.
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The Move to Ban Homework and Why it Matters
Homework has become a lightning rod for controversy, a topic argued with all the fervor, and silliness of 6th-graders re-enacting the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Some schools are banning homework all together
It all boils down to one simple question; how much is too much?
The answer is… This isn't an SAT test. There is no oval to fill in with a pencil. The answer is there is no right answer.
In 2009, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) performed a study of 15-year-old students among its 38 member countries and found that American kids averaged 6.1 hours of homework a week, ranking them 15th overall. At 9.7 hours a week, Chinese students had the most homework time, while Finnish scholars and their scant 2.8 hours of homework, get to spend way more time doing whatever. Does it matter? Take Singapore, which comes in 3rd with 9.4 homework hours, but is the top dog in the OECD student assessment, PISA. Rounding out the PISA top five? Those lazy Finns, five spots ahead of the Chinese. The United States (which in the PISA survey is defined by 540,000 kids from Massachusetts and North Carolina) came in at #25, so clearly doing a lot of homework, or very little homework, beats doing some homework?
Is there any metric for setting a standard national allotted homework time?
Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the National PTA (NPTA) support a standard of "10 minutes of homework per grade level" and setting a general limit on after-school studying. This means a first-grader has 10 minutes, and a high school senior would have two hours. Sounds reasonable, right? Reasonable, but not scientific. According to a recent Slate article, the 10-minute rule is "not based on any research."
The standard in America is 10 minutes of homework per grade level
Given the role homework plays in the scholastic, social, and cultural development homework plays in a child's life, the lack of wide-ranging research into the topic is maddening.
Even the most basic metric is in dispute. A 2014 University of Phoenix study found high school teachers assign an average of 3.5-hours of homework, while the 2016 American Time Use study of full-time high school students found it took less than an hour to complete the daily outside-of-school assignments. These are not equal equations, both can not be true, except, of course, they can.
The crux of the is matter is the proper amount of homework is intertwined with individual students, which renders hard-and-fast rules moot.
The homework conundrum gets boiled down to personal anecdotes. If a child struggles with homework, it's a problem, one that can affect stress levels at school and home, and turn learning into a chore. A Brown Center on Education Policy report states that the homework burden isn't growing, but try telling that to a parent whose wigged-out child can't stay awake or focus because she's up until 1 a.m. doing schoolwork every night. (The terrific writer Karl Taro Greenfeld tried to live his eighth-grader's scholastic life for a week and declared "My Daughter's Homework is Killing Me.")
The main argument for homework, particularly in the upper grades, is that it prepares kids for their academic future. Well does it? An oft-cited 2006 Duke University meta-analysis looked at the years 1987-2003 to try and determine if homework improved academic achievement. The authors found a "stronger correlation existed in Grades 7-12 than K-6 and when students rather than parents reported on homework," and concluded with "the authors suggest future research." Presumably, outside of class.
