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sTATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

I undertook this project of Sleeping vs. Talking in class, in order to determine which is more disrespectful, because I do both in many of my classes. I rarely get as much sleep as I probably should be getting, and so if I’m not talking, I like to sleep. Many teachers find this disrespectful, perhaps even take it personally that I am not paying attention to what they have to say. Now, I honestly find most of what is discussed in every subject very interesting, and enjoy learning, but sometimes getting a little bit of sleep is more necessary to help me as a whole. Then, on the other hand, I’m pretty much accredited as the craziest kid at NOHS. I pretty much do what I want, and generally don’t care what anyone thinks of me, and because of this attitude on life, people tend to have a lot to say to me, generally about my antics, which I like to respond to. Needless to say, I do a fair amount of talking in class. I’m really quite curious of what my teachers and fellow students would think is more disrespectful.

Abstract

Being students of a high school, I was curious as to which students and teachers found more disrespectful, talking or sleeping during class time. I wanted to see if it’d be talking, because to me, that seems to be the more disrespectful thing. I sent out a survey to the teachers and students at NOHS, separately, to see what their thoughts were. I wrote up the survey to ask people to rate how disrespectful each was. The scale was ranging from 1, not disrespectful at all, to 10, extremely disrespectful, enough so, that the individual should be ‘white button’d.’ We asked those who were being surveyed to circle the numerical value which was representative of their feelings towards the topic, and this was to be done for talking in class, and sleeping in class.

Concluding Stages of the Study

After the surveys were returned to me, I witnessed quite a bit of response bias. I only received 33 of the 50 surveys that I sent out to the teachers. From the students, I did not receive very much cooperation, either, only returning 59 out of the original 100 I sent out. I decided to analyze the results that we had using a 2-sample t-test. My final conclusion was that the there is no significant difference between how teachers feel towards the two topics, in regards of disrespectfulness, however, than students feel that talking in class is definitely more disrespectful.