question: Why can I fall asleep so easily in a classroom setting but when I’m just sitting by myself in public I find it much harder to fall asleep?
comment: If I can still respond, it has to do with the safety in numbers. Alone you are unable to relax as you must be alert for survival.
passages: Civil inattention can lead to feelings of loneliness or invisibility, and it reduces the tendency to feel responsibility for the well-being of others. Newcomers to urban areas are often struck by the impersonality of such routines, which they may see as callous and uncaring, rather than as necessary for the peaceful co-existence of close-packed millions.
   Despite ongoing debate, there are some instances where religious freedom and secular stability have been temporarily balanced. In the United States, some administrations have introduced a "moment of silence" or "moment of reflection" in which a student may, if he or she wishes to, offer a silent prayer. The US Supreme Court decision in "Wallace v. Jaffree" (1984) held that a moment of silence in schools for the purpose of individual prayer or meditation constituted a valid application of the Free Exercise Clause, while a moment of silence for the clear intended purpose of a state-approved devotional activity constituted a violation of the Establishment Clause. In this same case, the issue of school prayer was further complicated by a distinction made between a public assembly attended by participants of their own free will, and a public event where attendance is legally required. A voluntarily attended Congress may open sessions with a prayer, but schools full of public pupils may not. Here the US Supreme Court has interpreted the issue as revolving around the degree of a government’s ability to indoctrinate its citizens. If it appears that participants at a state-sponsored event are more likely to influence the State itself, courts may treat prayer as "legislative prayer". If, on the other hand, the State is more likely to influence participants at its events, courts may treat prayer as "state-sponsored" prayer and thereby rule it unconstitutional.
   Many daily activities in contemporary society demand directed attention. In order to sustain such, effort is required to gate competing stimuli or thoughts so that one can pay attention. The constant demand of the inhibitory control may cause that directed attention to become depleted and result in attention fatigue. 
   Appropriate levels of ventilation is critical to occupant health, comfort, and cognitive functions, all required for effective learning. Recent studies at Harvard University and Syracuse University reported significant cognitive impairment from impurities in the air. Significant cognitive deficits were observed in performance scores in environments with increasing concentrations of either volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or carbon dioxide. The highest impurity levels reached in the study are not uncommon in some classroom or office environments. Filtering the air to reduce dust and pollen can be important to help prevent allergic reactions in students.
  
  Section::::Spatial characteristics.:Views.
   BULLET::::- Strict control of the learning environment – the presence of a distracting stimulus will lead to greater external inhibition when learning has occurred under tightly controlled conditions than when learning conditions are more variable.
  
  Section::::External inhibition in relation to disinhibition.
   One study, by Henson and Denker "investigates perceptions of silencing behaviors, political affiliation, and political differences as correlates to perceptions of university classroom climates and communication behaviors." They looked at whether students' view of the classroom changes whether they perceive the instructor and other classmates with a different political affiliation, with the instructor and other classmates communicating using silencing behaviors. The article stated that little has been investigated into student-teacher interactions in the classroom, and how the students are influenced. The goal of the article was to "determine how political ideas are expressed in the university classrooms, and thus, assess the influence of classroom communication on the perceptions of political tolerance."
   Psychological being in a tranquil or ‘restorative’ environment allows individuals to take respite from the periods of sustained ‘directed attention’ that characterise modern living. In developing their Attention Restoration Theory (ART), Kaplan and Kaplan proposed that recovery from cognitive overload could most effectively be achieved by engaging with natural restorative environments, that are away from daily distractions and have the extent and mystery that allows the imagination to wander, thereby enabling individuals to engage effortlessly with their surroundings. The theory works on the principle that the amount of reflection possible within such an environment depends upon the type of cognitive engagement, i.e. fascination; that the environment holds. ‘Soft fascination’ is deemed to occur when there is enough interest in the surroundings to hold attention but not so much that it compromises the ability to reflect. In essence, soft fascination, which has been taken by Herzog and Pheasant as a reasonable term to describe tranquillity, provides a pleasing level of sensory input that involves no cognitive effort other than removing oneself from an overcrowded mental space.
   Section::::Prevention.
  
  There are three different methods to address sensory overload: avoidance, setting limits, and meditation. The process of avoidance involves creating a more quiet and orderly environment. This includes keeping the noise to a minimum and reducing the sense of clutter. To prevent sensory overload, it is important to rest before big events and focus your attention and energy on one thing at a time. Setting limits involves restricting the amount of time spent on various activities and selecting settings to carefully avoid crowds and noise. One may also limit interactions with specific people to help prevent sensory overload.
  
  Section::::Marketing.
   We tend to act more favorably toward strangers whose mannerisms and beliefs converge with our own. In this case, we have a greater propensity to exhibit empathy, tolerate more ambiguity, and have a less rigid social posture when seeking closure. A rigid attitude, or close-minded thinking, leads us to seek closure to an interaction in the most direct way possible. If we were to exhibit empathy and attempt to think more objectively about the perspective of the stranger, we should in turn be postured to accept more ambiguity and seek the most appropriate solution instead of the most direct.
   Mara W. Allodi, Department of Special Education, Stockholm University's article "The Meaning of Social Climate of Learning Environments: Some Reasons Why We Do Not Care Enough About It, discusses the idea that social competence is as important to learning as the curriculum. Teaching has become more bureaucratic in the distribution of curriculum, its organization, and the system has turned it into more of a competition for high grades and less about human emotion. People often forget the importance of self-esteem and stress; these affect student interaction and learning. It is two-fold: one separates knowledge from the social climate. Classroom climate is not associated with learning.
   Indicators of the absence of student engagement include unexcused absences from classes, cheating on tests, and damaging school property.
  
  The opposite of engagement is disaffection. Disaffected [students] are passive, do not try hard, and give up easily in the face of challenges... [they can] be bored, depressed,
  
  anxious, or even angry about their presence in the classroom; they can be withdrawn
  
  from learning opportunities or even rebellious towards teachers and classmates.
   A study by Guéguen showed that the foot-in-the-door-technique is not only effective in person, but also online. In his study, he found that asking students for help saving a document as an RTF file via email increased their willingness to complete an online survey emailed to them by the initial requester. This information coupled with work by Swanson, Sherman, and Sherman, which found that students' compliance to an initial, neutral and small request not only increased their willingness to comply with a subsequent larger and anxiety-producing request, but also indicated that the anxiety-producing request was deemed less anxiety-producing than did the control group, has very large implication for possible online uses of the FITD technique. With the privacy and anonymity provided by the internet, the technique could be used online to gather information about anxiety producing incidents in a manner that would not produce as much anxiety as in-person questioning would. Further research in this domain is needed.
   "The Soft Classroom" is an article written by Sommer and Olsen describing a study they conducted on the impact of classroom design on learning. It describes the difference in student participation observed in two differently arranged classrooms.
  
  Street Art
   The open-space school concept was introduced into the United States in 1965 as an experimental elementary school architecture where the physical walls separating classrooms were removed to promote movement across class areas by teachers. However, in practice this is not typical since teachers, following social conventions, tend to teach in a traditional manner as if the walls were still present. Further, modern open-space schools tend to use modular furniture to separate class rooms in a manner similar to "Cubicle farms" used in many corporate environments.
   Certain education professionals, including Professor Gerald Unks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, strongly support this system particularly with young children. If poorly planned or laid out, open classrooms can sometimes lead to problems with noise and poor ventilation. Classrooms that are physically open are increasingly rare, as many schools that were built "without walls" have long since put up permanent partitions of varying heights. However, in many places, the open philosophy as an instructional technique continues. Larry Cuban states "To call it a fad would miss the deeper meaning of “open classrooms” as another skirmish in the ideological wars that have split educational progressives from conservatives since the first tax-supported schools opened their doors in the early 1800s."
   In addition to time management and sleep, emotional state of mind can matter when a student is studying.If an individual is calm or nervous in class; replicating that emotion can assist in studying. With replicating the emotion an individual is more likely to recall more information if they are in the same state of mind when in class. This also goes the other direction; if one is upset but normally calm in class it’s much better to wait until they are feeling calmer to study. At the time of the test or class they will remember more. 
  
  Section::::Types.:Study environment.
   "Whatever the cause, it is definitely the case that, when faced with a kid who refuses to go to sleep, we get annoyed, like all parents before us, but, rather than just abandoning the child to the dark and telling it that it can go to sleep or stay awake as it likes but it is staying in the bed until morning (remember Proust at the opening of "Swann’s Way"?), we sit there with it, reading to it and singing to it and distracting it with swirling night lights until it decides it feels like going to sleep, all the while thinking to ourselves, Go the fuck to sleep, kid."
   Variability in test scores can be produced by small changes in the testing environment. For example, test-takers will usually remain on task for longer periods of time if the examiner is visibly present in the room than if the examiner is absent.
  
  Section::::Research.
   According to this theory, behaviour, emotions, and thoughts are influenced by personal characteristics and the surrounding environment. In the context of school climate, the fit between students' psychological needs and the school environment plays a role in students' motivation for academic success. Because of the social nature of learning, the social identities of the teacher and each of the students is important and influences every interaction in the classroom. Students are affected behaviorally and emotionally by every encounter they have in the classroom. Humans have the tendency to conform to others. For example, if the teacher of a classroom has a confident and intelligent persona then the students are more likely to portray these same characteristics in the classroom. Adults from non-Western cultures often identify children's attention to and ability to copy adults actions as a social learning strategy and a sign of intelligence. When this external motivation to conform to others and the internal motivation to succeed tie together, this theory of being influenced by an environment come into play.
   In “Collaboration and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’,” Kenneth A. Bruffee cites thinking out loud and collaborating as natural states of learning, because they mimic the process of earlier stages of development. Citing Michael Oakeshott, Bruffee argues that “[w]e first experience and learn ‘the skill and partnership of conversation,’ in the external arena of direct social exchange with other people. Only then do we learn to displace that ‘skill and partnership by playing silently with ourselves, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation”. In other words, he believes that the concepts of independent learning and thinking are more like social constructs than a natural state of being. Despite believing in Oakeshott’s theories about collaborative learning being natural, he acknowledges the difficulty of blending this with the independent and authoritative environment of the classroom, especially the college first-year composition classroom. Bruffee confronts the overarching fact that “[h]umanistic study, we have been led to believe, is a solitary life, and the vitality of the humanities lies in the talents and endeavors of each of us as individuals”. On a more minute level, collaborative pedagogy becomes problematic for instructors who worry that classrooms will spiral out of control, in “…an adversarial activity pitting individual against individual”. However, Bruffee thinks that if composition instructors and scholars believe in writing and learning as a process from which everyone can benefit, then it is important to forge community through collaboration, despite the individualist discourse of the university.
   Mia Moody states that Twitter can be used to teach students. They will be more involved in lectures and lessons if they have a chance to use social media throughout the course. Social media has changed the way people live, connect, and do business. She also explains how it is a good way to improve student participation. Shy students are more likely to open up behind a computer screen or the screen of their smart phone.
   Coan attended a specialized program for high school which allowed her to be in a normal classroom for part of the week and at home for the other days which allotted much more time and flexibility to her training schedule. Coan graduated from high school in 2014 and was academically ranked the top in her class.
   Section::::Effectiveness.:School closures.
  
  School closures were shown to reduce morbidity from the Asian Flu by 90% during the 1957-58 outbreak, and up to 50% in controlling influenza in the US, 2004-2008. Similarly, mandatory school closures and other social distancing measures were associated with a 29% to 37% reduction in influenza transmission rates during the 2009 flu epidemic in Mexico.
  
  Section::::Effectiveness.:Workplace closures.
   Besides Roger Barker, one other pioneer in the research of manning behavior settings is Allen Wicker. Following in the footsteps of Robert Barker and Paul Gump, Wicker also looked closely at behavior settings and supply of manpower. Much of what Barker and Gump concluded in their Big School Small School research was also repeated by Wicker who nearly replicated the original research. He looked into small and large northeast Kansas schools much like Barker and Gump. He found that while small schools offered more behavior settings relative to population (understaffing), which Barker and Gump assessed as having more beneficial experiences. Wicker took more of a stance on the behavior setting itself as opposed to the staff manning the behavior setting. Wicker examined juniors in four small high schools and compared them to juniors of one large high school. In the end he concluded that while the small schools ultimately supplied more understaffed behavior setting some settings in the small school were overstaffed (i.e. a popular sport). Likewise, in the large school some behavior settings were understaffed. In both small and large schools, Wicker showed that members who were engaged in leadership roles would report a more positive experience.
   Public meetings and consensus conferences may create knowledge gaps between high SES and less SES participants. The demographic, prepositional and cognitive differences between two groups in public meeting may lead to differing outcomes of public engagement. For example, highly educated participants may learn more from discussions and dominate the conversation while less educated members listen to their arguments. Furthermore, only small proportions of the population who may be already informed attend public meetings while the majority of the population who may need information the most do not. In such case, any public engagement effort may widen existing gaps further.
  