New research says starting university classes at 11am would improve learning
qz.com
qz.com
After the first test was failed for not showing my work I dropped the class. My grades in every other class went up after that (next class was closer to 11am) and I never took another 8am class during college.
Painful memories :'(
There was a box for homework at the front of the large lecture hall that 10 minutes after class began the professor would place the lid on the box and tape it shut. If your homework wasn't in it before then you got a 0 with no recourse.
Total nonsense, but it was a required class for engineers. I barely passed and did not give a fuck about that.
Luckily the professor let me take the final on my own later in the library, though he'd thought I had skipped it because I had a near-zero on the quizzes that were worth a few percentage points going into the final. However, there was a section on Taylor series which I hadn't seen before on the final, so I was certain that I had bombed it.
I wrote a long email talking about possible summer projects or something, so that I'd have the prerequisites for the next year. I got back a cheery email, "don't worry about it, you got an A, enjoy your summer!", and explaining that the Taylor series was kind of an extra to see if anyone could figure out the material that wasn't part of the course while taking the exam.
Obviously, I'd taken a lot of unwise risks, but I guess I got lucky with a professor who identified with an immature student who knew the material but had only taken a course because it was technically a prerequisite for something else.
Made a similar mistake. I showed up to an Astronomy final... 2 hours late by mistake! Prof hands me the test and says you have 20 mins to finish. Somehow I scored an A. Pure miracle.
So I'm up all night before the final trying to get through this material. Then I hit the Taylor and Maclaurin method of turning every function into a polynomial. It was difficult to learn, but at least it was straightforward once you got the trick of it.
Due to coffee related stomach sickness the final was rescheduled anyway so I learned a good deal of the patterns for the integration but what I ended up doing was using Taylor series if I got stuck since I could just convert it to polynomials, do the integration, then try to convert the infinite series back into a reasonable looking function. If not, no worries, it's still technically the same function so maybe I lose a few points here or there, better than nothing.
Oh and there was a bomb threat during that retake. I made sure to walk right next to the prof while the other 8 people writing with me held back and essentially cheated. I asked the prof why he was letting them do it and he said "Oh, I'm just going to deduct 15% from everyone's exam but yours".
Really dodged a bullet there, lol. Kinda miss university at times.
Also, you got an A in the most efficient way possible in that class, in my opinion. THAT is intelligence in a nutshell! At least on my IQ ruler, lol
Too many side projects means I wasn't really focused enough to get a graduate degree, but hey, you have to live life as you want, and go after the things that make you happy.
At some point (I think a few years before 2008?), Cornell also renumbered the courses by adding an extra zero to convert them to four digits (as required by the new PeopleSoft course management system).
I started with a B- after the first prelim (which was the median grade), had to go to tutoring at the Math Support Center in Mallott and go to office hours, and after all that, I managed to somehow bring up my grade to an A- by the end of semester. Even still, it was VERY stressful.
I wonder how you must have handled having to retake the class. I would've been losing my mind from anxiety if that happened.
Take 8AM classes only if you expect to have no social life to speak of.
Years later I got diagnosed with sleep apnea (apparently had since birth) so the odds were stacked against me from the beginning
http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~minilek/cs229r/fall15/lec.ht...
It has became really troublesome when I started working. If I was awake after midnight it became really hard to fall asleep. And I feel bad that I can't be at my top at my job because of the time difference.
For me, ideally I would work from home until lunch, and then come into the office for the remainder of the work day. Not having to get up and get ready in the morning would push my schedule even further towards my comfort zone. Plus, my compiles are quite long (FPGA work) and I can easily shower, get ready, or cook breakfast after kicking something off. Someday!
As an anecdote in the opposite way, I am a sort-of night owl (my peak hours are roughly 10:00pm to 1:30am). As a teenager I was a late night, late morning (4am to 2pm) sleeper. Around 17, I started training at 7am, meaning I had to be up at 5:45 every morning. When I eventually quit after about 4 years, it took me another 4 years to un-learn the habit and move back to being an evening person.
And I certainly adjusted from my "classes start at 7am" in highschool schedule to my "classes start at 12pm" schedule in college near instantaneously.
It helps that I'm not very good at sleeping on airplanes unless I've been awake for >30 hours
I get pretty wiped out for a week when the clocks go forward or back. I'm only marginally productive when the sun is up, but get a huge amount done from about 8pm to 2am.
But so what? That's me. I don't expect the rest of the world to be the same.
Sleep is clearly very individual. Standard school/office hours are a hugely inefficient waste of the potential of tens of millions of people.
It should be possible to design a more flexible system. But we still have ridiculous notions that early risers are somehow the model of virtue, and everyone else should aspire to the same hours.
The paper itself seems to consider the effect to be largely genetic in origin, which I assume is probably a well-supported conclusion from other studies.
Unless student habits have changed a lot since my time, many of them are stumbling out of bed at 7:45 to make that 8am class and haven't had anything to eat or drink yet. They consider themselves “evening people” rather than “morning people" because that's when the most interesting parts of their lives are happening.
In college, I remembered only signing up for 11am classes as a freshman before changing to 9am classes in sophomore and senior year. I think a lot of this has to do with staying up late in college.
There's probably a time where students can function properly, earlier than 11am, if they were to sleep by 12am.
Having said that, from a genetic standpoint it's possible to have it so that just certain stable percentage of population has a given trait.
How can it be selected for - be eliminating whole villages/societies that have a wrong ratio.
Imagine you need 5% of population to be crazy risk takers with no survival instinct. Any more and a village collapses, but any less and you won't have anyone take certian risks when necessary.
Now, let's assume that the gene is encoded in mitochondrial dna (carried from mother to child, no influence from father). Also, nobody can really tell who has the gene uless a disaster strikes and such a gene is very helpful for survival or reproduction. So if a generation T has X% of this gene, T+1 will most likely have X% too.
Originally, nobody has the gene. So all the societies kind of manage to go by without it. Then one woman has it by random mutation. Her is now 1%, others are 0%.
But then a disaster strikes. And villages with 0% die off. 1% villages die off too, but not as much. After the disaster they are now the majority.
In one of the villages, a woman with the gene, by pure chance) had more children than usual. In that village the ratio is 5% now.
Disaster strikes again, and only villages with 5% are left.
Villages where the ratio increases above 5% through chance again, die because the chaos ensues. Villages with lover ratios are decimated once in a while.
One day people invent ways to protect themselves from the disaster, and ways to cope with above 5% ratio too. Then the gene will begin slowly drifting in one direction or another. But it will take generations for proportions to change significantly, and it's not certain if the geme will disappear or dominate the population ultimately.
I'm not syaing that this is the case with sleep, but that's the wyanit might work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype
> I'm quite skeptical of the concept of humans "evolving" different time-preferences
As described in the wiki link above, the differences in "time-preference" are basically down to natural variance - I don't believe there's any evidence of a bi-modal distribution.
Nature does seem to select for anti-fragile populations (because by definition they are robust) and one way of achieving this is to have a certain amount of variability in phenotypes.
A modern cartoon characterization of type three is Dagwood Bumstead from the comic strip Blondie. He would get up naturally for midnight snacks and over-sleep for work or snooze during work. Type three Victorians were noted by their physicials as naturally rising for midnight prayers or sex with spouses.
As to genetic selection, the postulated survival advantage relates to the military three watches of the night. With group members naturally awake throughout the night predators were better protected against, surprise attacks less likely, etc.. Hence, a mixed group consisting of all three types would have a survival advantage.
I know my own sleep basically drifts later and later until I run into hard deadlines. I'd be surprised if most people don't work that way, in a vacuum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep%E2%80%93wa...
Flatmates doing Math, Chemistry and Physics and we all had early lectures.
Chap doing Philosophy would complain, quite a bit, about his Tuesdays as he had a 10:00 lecture.
Unless your institution has a "quiet dorm" you can get a slot in, and you are sufficiently secure in your own, non-mainstream social status...
P.S. U.S. perspective.
You could always transform your university into a miserable oppressive environment which no one really wants to go to, enforcing early quiet hours in every single dorm...or you could just push the class schedule ahead by a couple hours.
However, a big chokepoint at my current school (major state university) is the availability of classrooms. Classes are already booked in the old (and recently expanded!) building and in the new graduate building for 12-plus hours each day.
There simply isn't enough space to put off scheduling courses until 11.
Besides, just because something is good for the average student doesn't mean it's good for all students. My classes certainly have a different flavor depending on whether they're in the early morning or late evening. Even if it's the same course, the differently timed sections have their own character and attract different sorts of students.
Holy pi, if only the education system could understand this simple thing... >.<
Indirect cognitive enhancement is good enough for me.
What is frustrating is the article does not give that great information where I can just take a few of my own theories and test them through here.
I remember having a routine in high school where I would wake up at 5 am, do some language deciphering intense reading for half an hour, read through some interesting non-fictions for another half, get ready for school, and become sharper than anytime I have been before by 8o'clock.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I physically wouldn't be able to. I'd try (most impressive in the world would require that I do my best), but at the end of the day circadian rhythms are really hard to tame.
Yikes, that seems cruel, given that might mean getting up at 5am or earlier.
What would be cruel would be depriving these students of work opportunities because some students don't need the income and can afford to sleep in.
That's terrible.
I won't project my experience on anyone else; I do however feel strongly that the learned ability to impose my sense of responsibility on my inclination has been a valuable skill in my life.
On the other hand I had more than one undergraduate class start in the early evening.
You may be the outlier, rather than the average scenario.
That is why it is survivorship bias. You are assuming that it is possible for everyone because you and your coworkers were able to do it, while ignoring the fact that many people flunked out because they couldn't do it. That is what survivorship bias is.
If colleges treated students with military expectations, they'd stop getting as many applications. The school would paradoxically become less completive over time.
It's why colleges are putting in luxury student dorms and spending millions on activity budgets. The pampering of the American college student is a direct result of universities turning into degree businesses, instead of the halls of mutual development they used to be. Growth and development require sacrifice, paying for a slightly higher number on a transcript does not.
No, I don't. I want outliers, people who have extraordinary ability to function at all times of the day.
I want the 20% exceptions that make it, not the 80% average folks who drop out.
I would rather have someone who has no problem staying up late rather than someone who is a 'morning person'. Once awake, night owls seems to be better at staying awake.
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-say-they-ve-finally-...
Around the time I turned fourteen I lost my ability to fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning. I hung on to decent grades by "testing well," but never able to keep my head up during morning classes. All along people told me it was a discipline problem, and I followed their goddamned advice and got nowhere.
The last fifteen years of research in sleep and brain chemistry have validated my experience. It had nothing to do with self-accountability and responsibility; some people are night owls, others are not.
Fuck you for thinking that your personal experiences are indicative of me having “poor character.” Fuck you and your fucking career.
Initially the rest of us endured it and would turn-off the radio when they fell asleep, to then enjoy four hours sleep. After the second week, however, we managed to 'cure' the night owls.
I am sure many people suffer a medical condition that impairs sleeping. Most, however, do not.
We all know how activating it can be when someone treads callously into a painful area. But you need to let that surge pass before replying. Failing that, re-read your comment and edit out any uncivil bits after you post. In this case, deleting the first and last paragraphs would have made for a fine comment and a more effective rebuttal.
My ex husband was career military and used to say the same thing about our homeschooled sons -- that they needed to develop a routine and learn to just get up in the morning because someday a job would require this of them. Meanwhile, Mr. Hypocrite To The Max never stopped being a night owl himself and would stay awake on weekends until 2 a.m. or whatever and go to work on Monday morning on 2 or 3 hours of sleep, then nap when he got home after work because he was short of sleep. Twenty plus years of military service never really cured him of being a night owl.
It always amazes me how talented people are at ignoring actual reality for some convenient theory of theirs.
Plus, you'd have fewer daylight hours to walk home after class.
Would a student struggling in an 8am class in Pacific time suddenly excel if they moved to the East coast and went to 11am classes starting at the same moment?
Is there any variation between the east and west extremes of a given time zone?
Is 11am post daylight savings as effective as 11am before shifting the clocks?
Or is this more about the social habits of the people around the students than the height of the sun in the sky?
There is absolutely variation between time zones extremes. The Spanish, for instance, notoriously eat and stay up "late" compared to the Polish or Germans. All three countries are in the same time zone, despite the sun setting about 2 hours later in Spain.
Social habits do matter (the Spanish schedule is somewhat more delayed than the 2 hours you might expect from sunlight alone).
If you'd like to look up more on this topic, you can read about light therapy, sleep hygiene, shift worker syndrome (where normal people try to sleep later than natural), and delayed sleep phase syndrome (where night owls try to sleep earlier than natural).
Most of the people I knew complaining about early classes were hung over. I only drank and carried on during the weekend to avoid that.
- the next mind-blowing revelation in this series of articles.
That said, the article appears to have been published by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, which does have a less than stellar reputation for rigorous peer-review and, as a result, article quality[0].
[0] https://neuroconscience.com/2016/01/15/is-frontiers-in-troub...
High school sports complicates logistics later in the day.
It's not just a question of learning; it's also a question of cost and resources.
But look at the opening photo folks.
We're being asked to give the younger generation later start times because they're going to stay out partying no matter what during school, and we better compensate for this.
What a pathetic state of affairs. Higher education is not meant to be 4 years of partying. Or if it is, let me know which schools are selling this vision, so as an employer I can more carefully filter people's 'educational' experience.
A systemic change of college and young adult culture would be required to stop students from partying late at night, I don't think the colleges selling or not selling this vision is going to have much of an impact.
I am not sure why pushing back some starting times is such a terrible idea given what we know about college students habits.
It kind of reminds me about addicts and either attempting to punitively discourage them and deal with the consequences or give them clean needles and at least ameliorate some of the problems associated with usage.