All-Nighters

It’s Thanksgiving Week and I’m remembering one lesson I learned in my first semester of my sophomore year at Oberlin College.

Researchers at UCLA did a controlled experiment on high school students to find out if staying up to study all night helped or hurt performance.

And it’s more significant than what I figured the first Thanksgiving Vacation. That year (1960), I discovered that taking the Party Train from Elyria, Ohio, to Chicago was a lot of fun, even I had an allergic rash around my waist from having drunk 3.2 beer for the first time the night before.

The all-nighter learning experience trip down memory lane was stimulated by a summer finding that students who pull all-nighters before a test do not do better than those who don’t.

In my sophomore year I had my first profession with whom I really clicked.

Thomas LeDuc was his name and he taught American history, a subject I took two years in junior high (because of transferring school districts) and one year at Crystal Lake Central High School.

For LeDuc’s first test, I pulled an all-nighter in the Wilder Hall lounge.

I got an A-.

When the second test came around, I figured I’d experiment and get a decent night’s sleep.

I got an A.

Never again was I tempted to stay up all night before a test.


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