Hacker News Reader

It's happening where I live too. It's amazing how quickly the discussion moves past "what's best for students" and into the "it's annoying to me personally" and "when I was a kid, we suffered" conversations.

To be fair, "I got fired from my job because I couldn't get there on time anymore because school starts too late" isn't particularly good for the children of the people getting fired either.

One person's issue with work is worth compromising the learning of all the other children? That's not exactly what I'd call fair.

Not everyone is a programmer in the Valley or East Coast that can just Slack their manager "will be an hour late today because X!" and everything is fine. For the vast majority of people, even white collar employees, not being at work at 9 a few times may mean termination.

It seems that such people can't possibly deal with legal problems, medical problems, car problems...

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.

That's very true. Many workers have to go to work with medical problems, take desperate measures if they have car issues, and lose their job if they get arrested.

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.

I can't help but think American work culture / expectations are pretty toxic.

It can be this bad, but it's not very common.

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.

Exactly. Or even production line workers. You can cost the company big money if they have to stop the line for you.

There are lots of jobs where it is not unreasonable to require punctuality on a pretty regular basis.

> It seems that such people can't possibly deal with legal problems, medical problems, car problems...

230 times a year? they probably can't.

It depends a lot on the community where it's happening. In some places, that 'one person' is actually the majority case.

It’s not just one person. As amazing as it sounds, lot of people are expected to be at work on time.

A cynical explanation here would be: those in charge wanted the appearance of having considered these changes without the headache / political risk of actually changing them.

Absolutely correct. The superintendent didn’t have the clout necessary to pull it off. What I think she underestimated was the sheer volume of discussion which would ensure which basically made it impossible to get any other policy changes done last year.

Of course none of the debate actually addressed if students would possible learn better from it.

Is that important if there is no way to make a different schedule work from a practical perspective?

What blew my mind was how parents of elementary school students somehow needed the late start time to make their work possible and parents of high school students needed the late start time... to make their work possible.

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 :-)

It is generally understood that students ages 14-18 are substantially more self-sufficient than students ages 6-11.

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.

Raising children is one of the fundamental processes of human society. If there really were a will, we could rearrange everything for them.

But the way we treat children and teenagers is rather callous and cynical at the system level.

If there was a will, teenagers would be allowed to come sooner or on bike or fully by themselves.

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.

> 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.

You can and should go to bed earlier. Learning to go to sleep is important part of adulthood.

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.

Yeah let's ignore the research that shows teenagers literally have a shifted sleep schedule and can't actually go to sleep early in a reliable manner.

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...

Sleep deprived person is able to sleep in the dark. Try again. And no, even if suboptimal, middle class teenagers don't go through atrocity nor torture.

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.

> sleep in the dark

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.

I don't know about this man... I get your point but it's a little over dramatic.

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.

This. I mentioned up above that I've always been a morning person along with most of my friends. But, I didn't grow up with a device attached to me. Most of my activities growing up were outside. Going to school early meant more daylight after school to play. Even on weekends I was up with the sun, and often earlier since the surf was typically better early. All spring and summer we would be up at ~4:30am to go fishing. Kids staring at devices all hours of the day has had an enormous impact on their lives that I'm not sure we fully understand yet.

I've never been a morning person. Always been awake late and struggled to wake up in the morning. Imagine how it feels to have people dismiss this as a problem with screen time when I grew up without any screens! (Literally - not even a TV).

I think you will find that people like to generalize everything to black and white so things make sense when in reality there are much more complex things at play, not to mention that humans are not designed to fit one mold. Somehow this is a commonly accepted truth when it comes to baby with “all babies are different” but when focus shifts to teens and adults we are supposed to be neatly organized into cstegories and labels. Pleeeeeeeease...

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.

Enforcing sleep deprivation is torture. But that goes far beyond having a terrible wake-up hour. If you can sleep freely in the same 12 hour window each day, you're not being forcibly sleep deprived.

If you are sleep deprived to the point of "torture" you will fall asleep right during the day in noisy place.

No study of teenagers sleep patterns found that they are tortured via sleep deprivation. That is lie.

Uh... lots of high school students literally fall asleep in the middle of class. There's a reason it's a pop culture cliche.

That is not caused by different natural rhytme, that is caused by them not going to sleep till they are exhausted. It does not happen if they are not allowed to watch TV or browse the net or chat of social whatever and are sent to bed by parents.

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.

I mentioned it because I was one of those kids. There was nothing "cool" about it, and I found my persistent insomnia, relative to high school schedules, frustrating at best. I got detentions several times for falling asleep in the middle of classes I personally found interesting.

I am pretty confident that that level of insomnia is not cause by normal teenager sleep patterns. If you can't sleep so much that you sleep in sch ool, then your problem is medical.

> If there was a will, teenagers would be allowed to come sooner or on bike or fully by themselves.

Wait, are there some places in US where teenagers aren’t allowed to do that?

They are not allowed to come home by bike now? What am I missing?

My campus had a rolling start of day, depending on the university that's attended.

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.

> 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.

The school district my kids are in does this. High school starts 1 hour after elementary, and the buses just run the same routes twice.

That’s what it is here except reversed — buses do the high school run first, and the discussion was around reversing it - like you would think it would have been from the start.