Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks
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news.berkeley.edu
But it wasn't until my first kid that I finally understood that school doesn't start this early because it's good for the learning experience.
It starts this early so parents can get their kids to school and start working afterwards, without getting fired.
Oh well.
You could argue that maybe some solutions were not even tried before, or that they were tried and abandonned for random reasons. But actually, since the evolution process took a long time, we can reasonably say that we are witnessing the mean outcome of these events. Aka, in this case, the overwhelming majority is a work-related school schedule.
This doesn't invalidate 'free schools' such as Montessori, as these could be good local solutions. They just apparently don't scale to the ensemble of society since they didn't yet and had plenty of time to do so.
Another remark : this doesn't apply to things that were recently invented or discovered.
https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights
(I was actually shocked that Americans don't always get paid holiday.)
Note that we also have 6 months paid maternity leave, and 1 weeks paid paternity leave, with both of those extendable on a lower pay rate.
New legislation from the 2010-2015 government allows parents to share this leave, even if they work at different companies, and start/stop it during the time when it would be taken (so mum can take the first 3 months off, then dad take a month off, then mum again, etc). Sorry for the hetero-normative example, adoptive parents also get paid leave in the same way.
So why are salaries in the U.K. so much lower than the US?
Seems like the only one paying for holidays is the worker.
Except here is something you didn't know - that British citizen isn't paying income tax at all. Their 0% bracket goes all the way to about $16,000 USD Today. That US citizen is paying about $1650 in income tax because there is no 0% bracket in the US. So in actual take home income they are almost exactly the same. The mess of tax code in both countries makes the calculations more complicated, plus other taxes, etc - but the point is that no, U.K. citizens are not being paid "so much lower" than the US on average, but they do get the benefit of never dying of preventable illness because they can't afford to see a doctor while having all that extra aforementioned paid time off and holiday benefits that US workers don't have.
Additionally, the US isn't even at the top of median individual income. Fennoscandia collectively has the US beat, by on average about 20%. Which is going to be offset by their average ~25%ish income tax, but still its comparable returns.
It turns out that if your economy is abusing you to get more productivity out of you that you don't get a better living out of it.
I would expect self reported income like that to be based on take home pay (so after taxes). And for many in the US, they will have health benefits that they don't include in the self reported figure (they may not even realize the amount their employer pays). That's hard to account for compared to the "everybody can use the NHS" included in the UK figure.
I made ~$80k USD and because of various tax incentives (3 children mainly), I paid almost exactly the $1650 ($1683) figure you mentioned for federal income tax.
So my intuition is that the tax burden for most poor families is almost nothing.
Untrue for Sweden[1] and Norway[2], which have respectively 14.3% and 16.8% of their populations foreign-born. Not all of those foreign-born are from developing nations but developing nations figure heavily in the top-30 list for Sweden.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Demograp...
Norway is not significantly different when looked at in a similar light.
I wonder why? Could it be that competition has inspired them to compete? My point: free markets are a powerful thing. When there is no differentiation and everyone is “the same,” then it stifles innovation. Working at Peugeot is no more interesting than working for Renault. Which means their cars are going to be average. But if Peugeot were offering some great benefit, the best engineers would flock to Peugeot and that would result in better Peugeot cars. Renault, in order to compete would have to try and top Peugeot, which then leads to great engineers going there.. and so on until competition pressures ultimately drive companies to higher and higher levels of success and innovation. Just like what happens in Silicon Valley. Instead, in Europe, you have this malaise, this equalitarianism that inspires nobody. There is a lack of ambition.
Arithmetic is actually pretty useful for thinking about what more labor friendly laws might do in the US. Say you decide that every employee should get a paid day off if they work for 240 hours (this is 6 weeks full time, so someone averaging 30 hours a week would receive 6.5 paid days off each year). How much would that cost? It would cost right around 3% of what they are already being paid. And since we know people with no paid time off are working low leverage jobs, we can probably infer that it would come right out of the consumer surplus that their employee provides to customers.
But sure, let's pretend that some small baseline of non-hell would erode ambition in people competing for jobs at Netflix.
12 months paid leave at 67% of previous income plus 2 months if shared with the other parent.
There are so many companies you never hear about because you aren't in the industry they operate in.
In IT, I find it funny that Google has a higher market share in Europe than in the US.
The USA is below both Norway and Ireland in the rankings table of GDP per capita, pretty consistently over the different measurements.
I wouldn't personally attribute either of these to better educational or societal systems.
Are we going to ignore the effects of immigration and the comparative policies of both nations here, or just pretend that a mostly-homogenous nation like Norway (or other Scandi countries) should be equally compared to the United States?
Ireland’s gdp per capita overstates its wealth substantially as large parts of the economy by value is subsidiaries of US companies which repatriate profits back to the US. For economies like Ireland and Luxembourg better to use gross national product than gross domestic product.
Better again to use average individual consumption but statistics on that have only just begun to be gathered. Average household consumption makes the US look pretty great. The only country higher is the UAE and the top 5 is rounded out by Hong Kong, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Petrostates, city states and the US.
And maternity/paternity leave has little to do with school age kids.
France has the “genius” idea to have school only 4 days per week in most places. So Wednesdays off. Parents have to figure out what to do with their kids — they can’t exactly take off every Wednesday. And why does this 4 day week persist? Not because of ideal learning outcomes but because of teacher unions.
Europe isn’t better at everything and America isn’t worse at everything as people often like to suggest. And all of those great “benefits” people like to point out — they aren’t free. Salaries are dramatically lower in Europe and taxes higher — so even when all of these benefits are tallied, Americans still have more disposable income along with lower unemployment and a far more robust economy.
For sure there are great things about Europe, but don’t minimize America because it’s fashionable. Look at actual numbers.
I wonder what you mean by "Americans", I really don't see how a minimum wage American part time worker has "more disposable income" than someone in Europe with any measure of health insurance?
Minimizing America may be fashionable, but the awful situation of a lot of working people in America is not at all made up, and, no, the money doesn't compensate it. It just compensates it (maybe) for software engineers.
Perhaps, ask yourself why you come down on the side of moneyed interests in every point you make.
When I see this kind of dogmatic badgering, Its almost like my brain is superimposing a Fast Fourier Transform frequency plot on that person, and all of the energy is found to be in a single bin.
Your single bin is money. As this pure tone, it is literally your equation.
I don't have to tell you that this makes you give whores a bad name.
This isn't an agreement or disagreement with your underlying views; it's that you can't go offside when expressing them. Same applies to the other team.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it turns out you've been doing this a lot. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it any more.
And also, it doesn't fairly compare because this is legally forced, instead of letting the market determine such needs. The comment you're replying to is suggesting that naturally, companies which start earlier and aren't as accompanying of flexible working for parents, will do better in the market. Your comment doesn't debunk this theory.
I wonder how that dynamic will interact with the decreasing need for adults in the workforce.
Personally, if my 22 year old self travelled in time three years backwards to meet 17 year old me, and then travelled 20 years forward to present day to me current me, I have no doubt 18 year old me would the odd man out in this triplet.
In the same way that there isn't much practical (i.e. economic) interest in tailoring schools and college classes to people with different daily cycles, there isn't much interest in teaching people about common problems ahead of time, or running some kind of continuous life challenges training that could potentially do a lot to improve life quality.
In my 50s, one of the common problems my friends have is dealing with parents who are either dying, recently dead, or have a terminal illness like Alzheimer's.
Of course that happens to younger people too, but there are actuarial peaks where it becomes massively more likely that you'll be dealing with a certain set of challenges in a certain decade of life.
There's shockingly little information around about some of these challenges. So it's incorrect to assume that the learning ends after school or college.
You won't learn anything about dealing with these challenges there. You won't even be warned they exist.
Does it make his nebulous conspiracy theory more or less believable that you somehow think the age at which we stop warehousing kids actually has nothing at all to do with physical maturation?
You specifically selected parts of the body that finish maturing earlier than my statement, because it was the most controversial thing that popped into your head. It didn't pop in to your growth plates, it didn't pop into your elbow. It didn't pop into your left middle toe. It popped into your head.
You should allow these very statements to marinate in that same head, and see if you can come to the correct conclusion as to which part of your body I was referring to in my original comment.
If you look at post-industrialization patterns, the age at which humans become productive has been increasing as the productivity of humans has increased. On a subsistence farm, a 6-year old can be doing useful work to increase the productivity of the farm. In a coal mine or factory, an 8-year-old can do productive work. 16-year olds can do construction, food industry, but for jobs with decision-making responsibilities (as more and more jobs are today), we don't trust anyone under 22.
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9294.html
this is on my eventually 2 read list
Our society decided humans become more valuable when they are given the opportunity of a childhood filled with education instead of manual labor.
US student loan debt is somewhere around $1.4 trillion. For comparison, mortgage debt is somewhere around $8.9 trillion. That's a pretty damn big market. [0][1]
If that education was free, I'd wholly agree with you that it's simply our society deciding this is for the betterment of all. But when you combine these two sources of debt (student loans so we can get jobs that afford us home mortgages) then we're looking at a new, weird, first-world form of debt bondage. [2]
Again, I realize that's a very pessimistic point of view. Will be interesting to see how the history books view it in years to come.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt#/media/File:Stude... [1]: https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/economy/divided-decad... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
In addition to that, I think it's clear that there's two curriculums at school: a spoken one and an unspoken one. The spoken curriculum is math, science, reading, etc. The unspoken curriculum is mass social indoctrination around conformity, complacency, and willingness to do boring work with minimal reward for long periods of time. Essentially, to psychologically prepare children for the realities of work life.
This is basically what I'm saying; educational requirements are an easy way to track the workforce. At the end of the wars, the labor market contracted hugely (as those soldiering jobs went away), so our society cut the least valuable workers out of the workforce. That it had humanitarian justifications, in that those workers also had the least personal agency and influence over their working conditions, is almost coincidental.
Compulsory education in the US started in 1852 in Massachusetts and ended in 1918 in Mississippi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#United_St...
The first modern compulsory education was enacted in Prussia in 1763.
One boy's mass social indoctrination is another boy's ultimate fuck party.
However, I think it's important that we try to learn from this emerging data. If a body of empirical evidence starts strongly suggesting that starting school 1-2 hours later will improve information retention and learning, and if we collectively wish to maximize the success and potential of our youth then we must begin to change in order to support these goals.
I hope that by the time my future child reaches school age we will have begun to embrace a more data-driven approach to learning along with the necessary support structures to support such a change. Perhaps labor laws could be constructed to allow for more morning flexibility for parents that can demonstrate they are the legal guardian of a child whose age is between some range. I'll hope for the best.
But if you have the resources, you can look for what you believe would be the best path for your future kid.
My kids' elementary school actually does this. They tell parents "if your child has a doctor's appointment or needs to be out for a portion of the day, schedule it at the beginning or end of the day to make sure they don't miss anything important."
I went to a small district where they shared roles. My wife went to a huge school where the PE teachers taught only PE and were paid coached as well.
In some districts, you need certification in a subject... a gym teacher can’t teach math.
I went to large schools for both MS and HS, and all of our PE teachers only taught PE throughout the day, as it was offered all seven class periods as there were simply too many students to only offer the class two to three periods.
In HS, freshman tended to have the largest class sizes as they only had two class periods to choose from, and were split between male and female. They'd rotate through all sports during the school year. All other years got to choose their class period and were able to select the sport(s) they wanted, and would rotate through different teachers quarterly, within that same class period, based on those selections.
Coaches that only taught electives usually rotated in teaching Health/Sex Ed and Driver's Ed.
Are you familiar with the phrase: "There are two types of jobs, those you shower before, and some you shower afterwards."
You shower after manual labor jobs. That's just a matter of practicality.
I made a comment that getting ready twice in short order is a pain, which is why people wouldn't want to have PE first thing.
I don't see what any of this has to do with the difference in showering schedules between white collar and blue collar labor.
My dad worked in a factory and showered after he got home from work. That was the time of day that made sense because his work was hot and sweaty and dirty.
I suppose the idea could have been that you could have just not showered at all and showered once you were done with PE, but still unsure where this detour is headed.
But ask yourself this. Think back in time to those dreadful experiences and remember the people who didn't _appear_ to dread the experience.
Those people dreaded walking naked amongst their 14 year old peers as well, they just did a better job at convincing you that they dreaded it less than you.
You could even say that those were the victors who wrote your history.
"thats ridiculous, we quickly adapted over a short amount of time".
So, if I hear you correctly, what your saying is that as your understanding over time, lets call this du/dt, has a positive rate of change?
You're probably right though, the biggest trick Copernicus ever pulled was convincing everyone of heliocentricity by employing mathematics. We've been under the illusion ever since.
People have different perspectives on these sorts of things.
It doesn't mean that 4 year old me was stupid because I thought they hurt so bad, it just means that I've experienced things that hurt much worse.
Don't know how common that is.
As I recall it was because all the other teachers didn't want a bunch of sweaty smelly kids in their classes.
The thing that baffles me about it, is that if you're going to do physical activity like that, a shower after should be mandatory unless you are going home. Otherwise it's pretty gross. The result will be people not trying hard in gym, or people being unsanitary.
I guess this is all because we're ashamed of our bodies or afraid of sexual perverts? What the hell happened to us that we are this way?
I would have been afraid to shower in high school, the way it was. I have since showered in front of many strangers in the military and nothing bad has ever happened to me as a result. If you do have something odd happen, then that should be dealt with. But come on man, high school is not a prison. You are pretty safe to take a shower there.
tl;dr our society would rather be dirty and gross than see the naked bodies of our peers or be seen.
Funny enough, I did lose the weight, and am in much better shape now, through activities that are the antithesis of HS gym (turns out riding a bike and swimming for my own pleasure beat the torture of team sports any day)
One interesting follow-up study could be to compare night-owls/morning-larks in rotating schedule schools vs schools with fixed schedules. We could then see do night-owls do significantly worse in the classes they only take in the morning, vs night-owls who take classes rotating throughout diff periods of the day?
Could you elaborate on this? What is the reason? Saying it's "more economically efficient" than grouping class types is something many of my teachers would disagree with, as they have lives they would love to get to outside of school (e.g. if a PE teacher gets out early in the morning, they can go to their second job or see their own kids) and complain about having to stay at school because there isn't enough time between similar classes that are spread across different times of day.
Many school districts around the country are far too broken to worry about start times. The republicans have done a very good job of starving education for money over the last 20 years, and rampant corruption within the teachers unions and school/district administrations doesn’t help the situation.
It would also require a much larger gym and much more equipment. Same for all other subjects: many more musical instruments for music class, etc.
I got to go to a fancy school where there were like 12 kids in the class. It was amazing, I learned so much during my time there. Conversely, I went to some pretty shoddy city schools as well and the teacher could barely get the students to just be quiet.
I will say in yet another school (I moved A LOT) for my final semester of high school I went to an alternative school where you did all your coursework on the computers. You could work as fast or as slow as you wanted. It didn't take very many teachers to run that at all. The computer took care of most of it, including hints and letting you rewatch how to solve the problem. I loved this-- school was always kind of boring and I was always one of the first to finish and just end up reading a book...but I was able to finish up my whole class extremely quickly (I think a month or so, it's been a few years).
Physical Education, Art, Spanish, Music, History, Science, etc are scheduled around those accordingly.
The main reasoning is simply that math and English are the two subjects that build upon each other the most from grade level to grade level and because of that, they are considered the "core".
If you sleep through algebra, you can't do calculus, period.
that's why anyone can just sit in a history or physics graduate level course and be fine because they don't build on each other.
Organic chemistry would never depend on bio or chem 1.
however, if you sleep through algebra 1, its not used at all in geometry so its fine. And neither are used in discrete math.
such a bubble..
what if i told you most students don't learn anything past algebra anyway?
Different fields differ in how much they are built on mental models and how much they’re just a grab bag of connected facts you have to know and learn. Biology has more disconnected you just need to know it stuff than Chemistry.
Despite my best efforts in high school
I agree with you 100% that the average person doesn't need math throughout their lives. We need to stress teaching statistics though in schooling (high school especialy) because that is something that manipulates people constantly .
[1] https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/every-student-succeeds-act/...
Since the whole getting kids to school early so that someone can watch them while the parents work only really only applies to younger students, this isn't a problem.
I'd guess that a significant fraction of teenagers would have difficulty waking up and getting to school on time if they didn't have a parent around to wake them up, feed them breakfast, push them out the door, etc. Not all teens are self-motivated and independent enough to do this on their own every single day.
Our optimal sleeping time is based on the rotation of earth around the sun. We have removed our brain's natural sleep trigger (lack of light) so our sleep habits have been getting out of whack for the last couple of hundred years.
Why would other family members had been asleep? Wouldn't this natural sleep cycle have applied to everyone?
For some reason it's not difficult for me to sleep past sunrise, but very hard to go to bed before sunset or wake before sunrise. And some people are the opposite.
Also, most elementary schools around there offered before and after school programs that working parents can leverage to fit their schedules. That, and neighbors who took turns watching the bus stop to make sure everyone made it on time, gave us enough support to get to school when parents were on tight work schedules.
One additional reason is so that the older kids get home before the younger kids so they can supervise.
It's all perfectly rational. Unfortunately, ensuring students are rested and alert is far down on the list of priorities for education scheduling.
As a working parent, totally agree. Employers should be more accommodating for working parents just like they do for maternity/paternity programs, but they haven't yet.
Big corporations with HR and dedicated benefit personnels are more tolerable than most startups, unfortunately.
And you felt it necessary to pretend that people are explicitly trying to give parent's special treatment over non-parents, which isn't something I've seen anyone in this thread argue for.
And now I've gone and derailed the discussion further and given you the argument you were looking for.
That's fair, my comment does sort of sway. I'd delete it if HN let, my apologies.
To be fair, I did ask what it meant exactly, which was what I led with - but you're right, I did ask a second question.
I'm Still unsure what it means, exactly.
> And you felt it necessary to pretend that people are explicitly trying to give parent's special treatment over non-parents, which isn't something I've seen anyone in this thread argue for.
No, I didn't. I'm not going to argue the root, because you're right, it detracts from the conversation at large. Yet, I was not pretending by any stretch. (ie, my intent was not fake, again, this is not an argument, no one comment lol)
I was really surprised to see this is not the standard in the software world (where you can do your job just as well in overshifts to compensate for lost hours)
My cross country team had no problem getting up at 7 in the morning for weekend and summer practice.
I've always been a morning person. Even as a kid I remember waking up with the sun because sleeping always felt like a waste a time with so much fun stuff to do.
so much fun stuff to do
DID NOT. (and still do not)
...have "fun stuff" to do.
Every person is a little different. One of our kids is definitely very alert and ready to learn in the early morning. The other one, unfortunately, isn't. The one-size-fits-all schedule is much more for the convenience of adults than for the effectiveness of education, unfortunately. Some of the other commenters point out that important things should not be too early or late. That may well work better. But I'd be a little worried that there is no such thing as one good schedule that works for every child or even a significant fraction of children.
Yep. School is subsidized babysitting.
I have been writing about ways to reform the whole experience for years:
If you are the kid who lives at the first stop, sometimes your bus time is as early as 5:55. I would never force my child to be up at 5 something to get ready for school. That is beyond ridiculous.
Finally, there are legitimate concerns over bullying. Kids are ruthless on the bus and is a real problem. When I attended high school almost two decades ago now -- fights, bullying, name-calling and harassing were common -- sometimes by the bus driver themselves! I can only imagine how much worse it is now.
There is 1 adult to supervise 40 kids and drive a bus. I wasn't really bullied that much as a kid because I was always about a head taller than everyone else, but any bullying I did experience was on the bus.
Of course there are school buses but then those apply to the morning as well.
I wish more employers would be more flexible with time.
For whatever reason I simply am more energetic and happy if I sleep until noon. Even if that means sleeping 12 hours, instead of 8 or so.
The phase is irrelevant to me. So if I'm going to take control I get up earlier because I find that is more productive for me. I hate every single morning of my life, but if I let my clock do what it wants I hate my entire life.
Numerous teachers in my school told me the real reason school doesn't start later is because of... wait for it: Sports.
Sports games/teams often finish practice/games as late as 6-8pm, especially after traveling for a game - and that's with a district whose high school started at 7:40am and middle school at 8am.
Is it too much for schools to actually prioritize academics over sports? Colleges are the same way.
And can you blame them? Why are sports being prioritized by institutions whose existential purpose has nothing to do with athletics?
If you guess it would take five hours, they could gather at 5 AM and school starts at 10.
>And can you blame them?
No. Doesn't change that they would be unfairly blaming this particular issue on sports.
Something is catastrophically broken about your urban planning, school system, or community if every family is personally driving the kids to school. Maybe this meta-problem needs to be solved before addressing start times.
It was a complete clusterfuck. Both teacher and parents alike at both the elementary and the high schools all had a million reasons why it couldn’t possibly work. Since there are a limited number of buses which are shared, you can’t move one start time without moving the other.
It came up at every school event, sports practice, kids party, to the point where I would just walk away when people starting bitching about it one way or another.
The biggest issue was we had a new superintendent who wanted to “start a dialogue” about the start times rather than actually make a policy change. It took up hundreds of hours in PTO, Administrative, and Town Hall meetings and of course ended up in absolutely no change in the end. Everyone’s opinion of course had to be heard, whether it was a longer commute that a teacher would have, or then not having time to drop off their own child before getting to class, or impacting afternoon sports, or the something about the bus route, or... Of course none of the debate actually addressed if students would possible learn better from it.
I was so glad when they finally sent out the email saying they were dropping it just so that I wouldn’t have to hear the constant bickering.
It was like an engineering team with no lead and a non-technical manager arguing over what DBMS to use where no decision could be made until everyone agreed we had the “right” solution!
It's not as if you can schedule such things. Well, you could add more problems on a schedule I guess! You can't avoid the bad surprises.
If you've already missed 1 day for "my car broke down" and another for "I was vomiting", that one time you need to get the kid to school might be your 3rd strike.
Usually it happens in a job with fixed hours. Are you opening up the store in the morning? You'd better be there on time.
There are lots of jobs where it is not unreasonable to require punctuality on a pretty regular basis.
230 times a year? they probably can't.
Is that important if there is no way to make a different schedule work from a practical perspective?
But the way we treat children and teenagers is rather callous and cynical at the system level.
If raising children would be really considered important, caregivers needa would not be treated with "shut up and do the things the most complicated way".
For that matter, calling school that starts an hour sooner then optimal "calous" is overly hyperbolic, manipulative and dramatic.
Do you know how miserable it is to be chronically sleep deprived for, like, a decade? Yes, it's callous to make someone suffer like that for the convenience of everyone else.
The debate about whethe start an hour later or sooner due to natural rhythms is completely pointless for students that don't sleep even minimal needed amount of hours. Those need to fix "hours slept" metric first.
What's going on here is that we don't give a shit about people, and we like pretending that the world is fair, so whenever we're committing an atrocity (yes, this is an atrocity, sleep deprivation is a form of torture), we try to blame it on the victim. Because "we have generated an atrocity, built our society around it, and are now trying to not come to terms with that" is a tougher pill to swallow than "teenagers just all, universally, suck".
This is garbage and I really wish parents would start seeing this as a big issue, big enough to raise hell not just with their school, but with their job and with society at large. Parents sure seem to have enough energy to cause teachers problems...
If you actually went to bed and stayed there and could not sleep anyway despite being horribly sleep deprived, then you really should visit some sleep center to help you. It is not nearly the same as mild performance drop due to having suboptimal sleep time.
I'm not sure what you're even trying to say. This is about chronotypes and a teenager-specific sleeping pattern that has been identified and studied.
Sleep deprivation is torture, this is not my definition. Sorry, we, as a society, decided that not letting people sleep properly is really fucking crappy. If you want to disagree with that, take that up with the party that came up with the terms. Messing with someone's sleep is a major offense, and there are various ways in which it can happen, and psychology recognizes them, even if you don't.
Yes, I'm sure most teenagers have means to go to a sleep center, with their full human rights and disposable income. And when pretty much every teenager has this problem I'm sure that's a good use of resources.
No study of teenagers sleep patterns found that they are tortured via sleep deprivation. That is lie.
That pop culture cliché also have only kids who don't give a fuck about anything doing that. And it is fuelled by it being perceived as cool. Overwhelming majority of students don't sleep during class.
My 13 year old girl lives with us half the time. Her other parent the other part of the time.
They let her keep her phone with her all the time. She can completely skip sleeping entirely for more than 2 days when she has her phone all night, texting with friends. She's having fun, but then she crashes and burns HARD when she comes back to our house. Get's sick, can't focus, emotions out of control.
At my house we take her phone away at 10:00pm, and she is passed out 5 minutes later. Funny thing is, I sometimes take away the phone on Sunday, in the afternoon, and she will pass out 5-10 minutes after that too.
Her body just needs a lot more sleep than it is getting. This is probably true with a lot of adults too. We use electronic stimulus to keep us going far beyond our "natural rhythms". Take those away and people can sleep.
If the natural rhythm of a teenager is to be unable to sleep until 2:00am, what are they supposed to do if they ever change time zones? People may have a naturally tendency to be a night owl or whatever, but that is hardly the most important element in the sleep deprivation story going on right now.
My point being, your situation is not necessary comparable to others. Case in point, as a child I had a difficult time falling asleep at night without screens. I woke up late and was always tired in the morning. You might attribute this to a number of some factors we probably don’t have time to discuss here. Now, as a teenager I was able to fall asleep like a rock on most days but was still tired the next day in class. I can’t tell ya how many times I’ve heard “that lazy guy” Label being applied to myself and others who shared this trait because imo it’s too convenient to label someone rather than trying to understand the underlying issues.
In any case, I tend to agree that school most definitely starts too early for a growing human being whose development takes place at night and specifically mostly during slee when body is at rest. Is it a surprise then that a developing body requires more sleep? Circadian cycles or not, kids should probably start school at a later time. Now, whether society can accept this and modify adult schedules around new findings is a question not easily answered. I suspect for this to happen, society as a whole will need to move away from 9-5 or at least become more remote and or flexible.
Wait, are there some places in US where teenagers aren’t allowed to do that?
I tried explaining that parents of high school students almost certainly were once parents of elementary school children, and those elementary school parents will almost certainly one day have kids in high school, but gave up.
The best part was the parents who had kids in both schools who would still argue against the change :-)
Speaking for myself, I was largely self-sufficient in terms of managing my day at 14. My peers were as well. The major inconvenience of the early hours was being unable to chaperone a younger sibling.
I don't know when it was enacted but it certainly helped with congestion in the transports in the morning and in the cafeteria for lunch.
Students are autonomous though. I can imagine that school pupils are not and they cause troubles for parents.
We could have made school children autonomous far sooner if we wanted to.
I experienced this with an 8am biology class I was required to take. It wrecked my whole day. About 1/3 of the way through I just started skipping the class and then later getting notes of the lecture from a friend of mine. It ended up working dramatically well. I got an A, while my friend who got up every MWF to take the notes, got a B. It was kind of a wild result since my studying was based almost entirely on her notes. I hadn't given it too much thought, but it would make sense if being sleep deprived is what hurt her in this case.
It turns out, waking up at ~6 every morning, and usually not going to bed until 10/12 thanks to after school classes and homework, left me with less sleep than I even need to be functional now as an adult and turned highschool into a special sort of "kid jail".
I got punished innumerable times for sleeping in class, and probably spent more time by % fighting to keep my eyes open than I did paying attention. (I had at least one teacher who threw chalk at students who slept, it was such a common occasion)
This changed like a lightswitch when in college I was able to assert that I didn't take any classes before 10. By the end of my masters I had a 4.0 (highschool had been a struggle to maintain a 3.0 with much easier classes), although it took most of that time to re-learn how to learn and pay attention. The difference was so stark it puts a fire in my belly just to think about the amount of resistance I've seen to changing this status quo. I recognize this is "for adults/work" but as a working adult I refuse to concede that we can't come up with a solution that doesn't so entirely steamroll some kids for being wired to need more sleep.
Before Children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersomnia
I would encourage your friend to look at the Circadian Sleep Disorders Network site:
https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/
There is a mailing list mentioned there for people with circaidian rhythm disorders, a good way to hear about what works or doesn't work for other people (you don't need to join the organization to subscribe). There is a huge amount of individual variation both in how people are affected and what helps deal with it. Some people do well if they stick to their internal schedule and some of us don't. Unfortunately, there isn't really good treatment for circadian disorders and trying to live on the shifted schedule can be the easiest for for people who do well on that schedule (which is not to say easy as finding a job on such a schedule can be very difficult).
The standard treatment recommendation is melatonin and avoiding light before bed and light therapy in the morning. This works for some people, at least for a while, but not for most people (I'd recommend putting some effort into trying to adjust the schedule, just know that it might not work). If avoiding all screen time is too difficult, I recommend turning the color temperature on f.lux or redshift way down (I use 2500K). Also worth noting that trying to adjust your schedule by shifting forward can turn DSPS into Non-24 (that is what happened for me, and the CSD-N survey shows it has happened to a bunch of people while only a few find it helpful), so I'd highly recommend against that (unfortunately some sleep doctors recommend it). Also, stay away from benzos; they don't work long term but are addictive.
From age 12 to 23 I thought something was wrong with me as a human because I was tired, depressed,and anxious but I've learned that when I sleep well those symptoms disappear. Life has been much better since I gained more control over my schedule.
Apparently your sleep cycle does slowly get earlier as you age so maybe I’ll be able to do 9am to 5:30 in a decade or so! I may go back to the doctor and try melatonin supplements or something, but as long as work’s OK with it I’m doing alright.
Though I suppose there is a self-talk component too, whereby if you convince yourself it’s an innate problem (you’re young, you’re a developer, you’re special) then it might feel more like one. I used to tell myself I couldn’t exercise in the morning, a belief I maintained into my forties, then one year I needed to, after about a month of getting used to it, I was then a morning exerciser...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1440-1819....
I agree with you that people do not perform when their rhythms are not in sync with their lives’ demands. However commenters and the article writers are inferring there is some inherent trait that prevents their body clock from adapting.
Which in turn might imply that humans still being rather young species is tuned to a rather strict day/night cycle, as seen close to the equator.
Aside: If you really want test scores to improve, give the kids food. My SO is an educator and she's had kids come in that only get food at school. All weekend they may only eat a bag of Cheetos, sometimes up to 2/3 kids on Monday mronings. School breakfast and lunch are sometime the only food they get.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
I think that we can answer that question with a fairly emphatic 'yes'.
I know we live in a different world today, but I feel like shifting our schedule because of poor sleep hygiene and bad light habits is kind of reinforcing a bad habit. Whose to say that the shift wouldn't just perpetuate itself even after a shift of 1 hour later.
> I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times.
This is absolutely not true for adolescents continuing through young adulthood. Adolescents naturally have a delay in morning alertness levels compared to fully mature adults and other children and also have sleepiness set in more slowly/later in the evening than either other group. It is not (necessarily) poor sleep hygiene which causes teens to stay up later, but their own biological processes.
> Before artificial light, our sleep/wake schedule was set by the sun.
This seems to be an argument in favor of changing times. My highschool started at 7:10. Assuming I woke up an hour before to shower, dress, and catch the bus, that means I had to wake before the sun every day of my highschool career. The only time the sun rose earlier than 6:10 was during the summer when I didn't have school.
I'm genuinely curious about this, do you have links to evidence of this? You're asserting a certain causal order, but everything I've seen such as the article this thread is purely observational so doesn't say anything about the causality of it.
Abstract: Sleep deprivation among adolescents is epidemic. We argue that this sleep deprivation is due in part to pubertal changes in the homeostatic and circadian regulation of sleep. These changes promote a delayed sleep phase that is exacerbated by evening light exposure and incompatible with aspects of modern society, notably early school start times. In this review of human and animal literature, we demonstrate that delayed sleep phase during puberty is likely a common phenomenon in mammals, not specific to human adolescents, and we provide insight into the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.
Not to say we shouldn't work on sleep hygiene, but the myth that it is a modern crisis is misguided. Used to, people blamed caffeine. Just look for numbers to see how much more coffee used to be consumed.
All of that said, much of the difficulties in education for kids are also explainable by our bar just being higher. Much higher. But, I'd rather our methods improve. Not lowering our expectations.
How do we know that the students who stayed up late aren't also the students that procrastinate and do all their work last minute, and thus recieve lower grades?
That seems like just as reasonable a conclusion to draw.
I was very much in the camp of playing video games all night long but I didn't kid myself about early class times being the cause for my struggle.
* Disclaimer: IANA doctor/biologist. Point me to a study that says we can't control when we go to sleep (aside from other health factors including insomnia).
I seem to recall that working just regular night shifts (eg 2300-0700) will cut an average 5 years off your life. Rotating shifts with half+ during night is even worse.
With great power comes create responsibility. Artificial light is a powerful thing when it comes to messing with natural sleep rhythms.
I'd guess there's some degree of both, but without the study being more longitudinal (eg, tracking the same population across their entire time in college to see how their grades and sleep habits relate) it's hard to say. Purely anecdotally, I've seen people who start struggling (for reasons that have nothing to do with sleep) drift into a depressive/withdrawn existence that includes insomnia and sleeping late.
I get that, but instead of immediately jumping to sleeping later maybe we should look at why kids appear to be going to bed later. All of the devices and distractions have likely pushed people to stay up later and later. Maybe the fix is not to move school times, but have parents take devices away at a reasonable time.
Why does everybody want to change the world around them and not just adapt themselves to the world, e.g.:
'To earn better grades, students should sync their biological rhythm to their class schedules.'
While some might argue that it is not easy to do that, I would respond that such skill is invaluable for your life ahead. Granted, not every job requires such a skill, but many do.
From my own experience, I can tell that exercising discipline to go to bed early paid off for my work experience and there are few things I hate more than being tired at work: While work hours wear on, you are not getting done anything either.
So I gave up and asked if I could start coming in at 9am instead. Never felt better.
The world can be surprisingly adaptive sometimes.
However, while I feel that my body has some kind of cycle too, for me it is possible to adjust it over the course of a few weeks.
And one way people acclimate to different sleep schedules is by forgetting what not feeling like shit feels like. People do not acclimate to commuting, they forget what not feeling terrible all the time feels like.
- less sunlight (vitamin D)
- lower payment
- lower education
Those might all affect the life expectancy and if night shift workers die earlier than those with rotating shifts, it is obviously a sign that not the change is the main factor for the lower life expectancy.
From my own experience I can tell you, that I neither forgot what feeling like shit feels nor was I forced to change my sleep cycles by some exterior factors. I agree to some extend with your examples, but I don't think those are the only options to acclimate to different sleep schedules.
I have to come an hour early for a meeting every other week and it's always a challenging day...
Getting up ~9am is the point at which it doesn't effect my performance anymore (I'd still prefer shifting my sleep phase even further). Sadly this only worked for a job once in my career.
I get up early and have since High School. All I do is make sure I go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Going to work, lunch, home early is friggin awesome. Avoiding rush hour, saving me roughly 1 hour a day in traffic, is fantastic. Plus it gives me time to do any personal things in the early afternoon without affecting my work schedule.
Here in europe daylight saving time just ended, now I have go to bed an hour earlier from one day to another. It took me out for 4 days (really bad performance) and the first 2 days I stayed awake in bed so long I became more awake again before managing to fall asleep.
Going to bed means I'm reading a book (physical, not digital) and winding myself down from the day.
I find exercising during the day helps immeasurably when trying to go to sleep at a reasonable hour (based on your own schedule). Also limiting caffeine after lunch.
To people that say it's impossible, maybe it is. I did have a late schedule for a few years in college (waiting tables until close). I still scheduled my classes for 9/10am at the latest starting time though. Maybe my working out when I get up helps as well. Plus personal discipline (both going to bed and getting up regularly).
I get 8-9 hours of sleep every night outside of rare exceptions. My mom said I've been this way since childhood. I would never give up sleep to stay up late, unless absolutely necessary.
My high school buddies would give me hell during the week, but I got up at 5:30am for my early bird weightlifting every day. So 9pm was "late" for me.
It was actually funny, after one of my recent trips to Europe from Australia, when I came back my (actual) jet lag weirdly landed me in a sort of normal cycle for a week and a bit. It was truely a bizarre experience - I literally cannot remember a time in my life (I'm almost 30) where I could regularly wake up before 9am and being able to go to sleep before 12:30 to 1:30 am and feel normal. But for this little while I was waking up between 7:30-8:30am and going to sleep between 10pm and 11pm. It quickly wore off (discipline doesn't have anything to do with it, you just can't fight your physiology) but it was really interesting and eye-opening experience...
I struggle to understand why, is that a decision you are making either consciously or unconsciously, or is it something about your environment?
For me, it’s absolutely not a conscious choice, and it hasn’t changed depending on the level of stress I’ve been under, and I’ve tried all sorts of things across living in three different places over the years...
I eventually found sleep science research that suggests that it is just extremely difficult to go against your natural circadian rhythm. I guess the problem for delayed people (and if I recall the statistics correctly, the severity of my sleep cycle delay is such that it only affects something like 2-5% of adults, but I think more than 10 or 20 percent of adolescents) is that anyone can be lazy and sleep in, but it’s far, far harder to go the other way - so the majority of the population with a normal or early cycle can just go to bed earlier and function normally waking up earlier, but it doesn’t work for everyone.
I've worked with friends that are completely different, and struggle to keep their eyes open after midnight. So there's definitely big differences.
I do generally manage to function well on "average" of ~8 hours of sleep every 24 hours: some night 8,9 or 10 some 4 or 5.
But yeah, if you're one of the people that can't understand how "changing the rhythm" can be a problem: try starting tour day at 0230 or 0300 am for a couple of weeks.
For the vast majority, that is though (hence attack right before dawn...).
I did this while in school, I slept 2am-7am and 4-6:30pm. Pro: you learn to fall in to deep sleep very quickly and I would often have lucid dreams and you can get away with slightly less sleep. Con: if anything gets in the way of the afternoon sleep phase it feels like missing half a nights sleep...
It is the same as telling depressed person to "cheer up"...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23044-8
abstract:
Misalignments between endogenous circadian rhythms and the built environment (i.e., social jet lag, SJL) result in learning and attention deficits. Currently, there is no way to assess the impact of SJL on learning outcomes of large populations as a response to schedule choices, let alone to assess which individuals are most negatively impacted by these choices. We analyzed two years of learning management system login events for 14,894 Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) students to investigate the capacity of such systems as tools for mapping the impact of SJL over large populations while maintaining the ability to generate insights about individuals. Personal daily activity profiles were validated against known biological timing effects, and revealed a majority of students experience more than 30 minutes of SJL on average, with greater amplitude correlating strongly with a significant decrease in academic performance, especially in people with later apparent chronotypes. Our findings demonstrate that online records can be used to map individual- and population-level SJL, allow deep mining for patterns across demographics, and could guide schedule choices in an effort to minimize SJL’s negative impact on learning outcomes.
Obviously lifestyle could be limiting if you’re trying to start waking up at 6am, but if you’re optimizing for GPA, then you’re gonna have to make lifestyle sacrifices anyway
Seriously, much of America is so entranced by high school football that entire district schedules are oriented around ensuring ample practice time after school.
It determines bus schedules and school start times for the entire district and all students.
Another commenter made more sense - early class times give parents time before work to prepare their kids for school. This football angle is ridiculous. If it were true, wouldn't colleges and universities suffer from the same standard?
At big football schools, they do in fact offer the courses that the majority of football players take early in the morning.
But at least the rest of us could choose classes that started at 10am instead.
Here is one such article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/how-sc...
You'll find case after case of local newspapers reporting on school board meetings where requests to move the start time were met with fierce opposition by athletic directors, etc.
Both my parents were educators (my mom ran special education for a school district, my father ended his career as Dean of the School of Ed @ Edinboro) and for a time I ran the countries top education blog. All three of us encountered this obstacle to sensible school scheduling across a variety of different schools and districts.
I'd say it's the leading obstacle that I've seen when you look at local district opposition.
from Atlantic article.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
My high school ran from 8:45-3:10. Morning activities were typically 7-8 or 8:15, so you could still drop by teachers classrooms before school started.
... I flunked that course. It's not my fault.
They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning.
And there is absolutely nothing that you can
learn out of one bloodshot eye. After I flunked
the first two tests, I grabbed the professor
by the throat and I said, "Why are you
teaching this **** at this ungodly hour?
Are you *trying* to keep this stuff a secret?"
Personally I've been a night owl and a morning person alternating between the two throughout my life by choice.
My grades (predictably) crashed early in high school, didn't start to recover until I discovered coffee. But that couldn't be found in my Utah high school, of course, so I either had to sneak a cup in or find someplace to "joe up" during lunch.
Additionally, six years ago I moved into an apartment with a huge east-facing window. Now I'm a natural morning person again — during the summer months.
This is an interesting study that doesn't necessarily suggest later class times will fix the issue but this could be a bit of a "wicked problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Of course there are more efficient times that we could use for school, but they would break the fragile system the US already has in place.
Block scheduling has alleviated the knowledge loss to an extent(imo). By changing from the full 7-8 classes per day schedule to 3-4 classes every day, students can retain more information because they are in each class longer. That also means your homework schedule is drastically less stressful.
I don't see any major changes coming to school times. The issue needs to be discussed, but what really can be done about it?
In addition (though this is Germany-specific) the "elite" of society (which were in the Gymnasium and send their kids there too) will resist fiercely any movement to a more equal system which does not separate children onto fixed tracks so that their privileges are not being cut (or watered down, when it comes to laxer admission criteria for Gymnasien).
Parents, especially concerned and wealthy ones, are a powerful group of voters. Ideally education should be taken away from political influence entirely and given into the hands of actual experts...
School started just after seven AM, and I never slept more than 4 hours. The only time the phone line was available for me to use my modem was at night so I preferred using my computer over getting good grades.
It took me a while to get to university but when I did I ended up an excellent GPA. Classes never started before 9, go figure.
I recently watched a PBS Frontline documentary back from 2002 that discussed this issue, and even then parents were extremely resistant to change.
Exercise, mostly cardio.
But I don't know if there is any causal relation.
If athletics, school must start as early as possible, so "away" outdoor games can be held outside in sunlight and "away" teams can get home at a reasonable hour.
If academics, school should start as late as possible, so students (and instructors!) can do class prep immediately before class and/or sleep in.
Its interesting that the only acceptable model of alternative education is essentially "pick your major in high school" such that there are art high schools or music high schools or aviation high schools, etc. And of course religious schools that have been around for centuries. However there are no business model schools based on priority, like a school with no athletics program that focuses on academics.
The real purpose of school is lowering unemployment by increasing babysitting years, along with raising the bar as a filter to reduce the number of "successful" kids needing jobs. Certainly we have far too much academics for our economy and culture to hold them.
I think it had more to do with how loud and how much energy athletics had towards getting their way (and the parents reeeally cared about football. This was hardcore SEC territory), vs how much spare time the teachers had. I don't think it was explicitly pro athletics vs academics, but it certainly was systemically.
The US have high schools with stadiums bigger than those in most towns in Europe, it's clear where your priorities lie.
I recall my high school days were absolutely awful, I could never wake up properly in the morning and I zombie-made coffee and then zombie-walked to school.
Right now, if I need to wake up at 6 AM, for one, it's much easier to just shift my schedule, and for another, even if I don't get as many hours of sleep it just doesn't hit me all that hard.
And I think people judge teenagers off of the adult scale, which is completely off...
My best semester by far was one in which I somehow managed to schedule all of my classes after 2pm until about 9pm.
I also have a hard time following multiple lectures during the same day. So a nice additional effect was that I, instead of attending, would study more efficiently in my own way.
http://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/SJL-2-40...
Find high schools with rotating class schedules (i.e. math is at a different time of day each day for 6 days, then loop that), then find high schools with fixed schedules (i.e. math is always first period for some students). Then, compare performance of night owls in the two different schools. Theoretically, if the authors' study is generalizable from college to HS, then the night-owls should do significantly worse in the early AM classes in the non-rotating school, and significantly better in the early PM classes in the non-rotating school.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/04/how-sc...
Call me cynical, but I seriously doubt that this is the actual goal of schooling for pretty much anyone. The real purpose of school seems to be a) to get rid of kids so they're not muddling about in early hours; b) to generate a hierarchy of kids so we can figure out who to put in the lower castes.
I would be careful about concluding that women and men have different biological clocks from this observation. I feel like society strongly discourages women from staying up late (constantly telling them it is unsafe / will make them ugly / suggests they are sexually active).
They meet at 7.45AM every morning and get most of the learning done while they are the freshest.
I am not convinced this study actually proves that but need to dig deeper in.
If there were more reasons for me to lose even more faith in academia.
Come to think of it, maybe it's weather-dependent.
Recorded online lectures beg to differ!
My son goes to bed at 8:30. He wakes up at 6. That wasn’t a biological imperative — we made him go to sleep early.
I mean, bioritm it isnt the only datapoint.
That really sounds like we're hand-waving away what is happening. The biology might be an effect, not a cause.
"Social jetlag correlates to GPA". Hmm, maybe the students who prioritized school and didn't go out drinking every night ended up doing better.
You don't "deserve" good grades just because you're smart. Work hard for it. Get up early. Go to bed. Prioritize. Give something up. That's how life works.
here's the original article for reference: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23044-8