Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

The problem with that is rotating schedules is more economically efficient than loading all the class-types onto one time of the day. This would mean you need more PE teachers in the morning, more math teachers in the mid-day. There's a reason schools have multiple periods of each course, and that those periods rotate day-to-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?

View on HN

At the root of it, they define "core" as Math and English with the goal to centralize those two in the middle of the day as much as possible.

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".

hm, that's very debatable. alot would contend history and science are core but others aren't. I've heard many complain that they never use math in the real world. I think math is core but the problem is its very opinion based. I don't see how other subjects don't build on each other.

the importance of the ability to calculate and communicate are debatable only by people in total denial about how pervasive both are in our society. should those people really have any say in the curriculum of our children's future?

hm, that isn't what i said. You were ranking them relative to eachother and i said people might disagree on the relative rankings. I said that "people may disagree that math and english are more important than history and science". You responded as if i said "Math and english aren't important". Those are two completely different arguments.

just because someone doesn't use math in the real world doesn't mean that it wouldn't benefit them to.

If you sleep through European history, you can still learn American history. If you sleep through biology, you can still learn chemistry.

If you sleep through algebra, you can't do calculus, period.

100%

so true. STEM master race.

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?

Physics is applied Maths, of course they build on each other. History and historical knowledge builds on other things, geography most obviously, but primarily on itself. It’s easier to learn and remember history if you already know some. But having studied history it’s quite obvious that at an undergraduate level it builds on itself much, much less than something like Math or Physics. The degree to which upper level courses depend on lower level courses is minimal.

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.

I think you're reading a lot more into my comment than what's there. I'm not claiming that math classes have a completely linear dependency chain, nor am I saying that no other subjects have classes with meaningful dependencies, and I'm especially not claiming anything about graduate level course work in any subject.

Organic chemistry is not an elementary school course. Science taught in grade school usually has few inter-dependencies because it aims to cover a very broad range of topics at a very basic level. Ditto history.

> If you sleep through algebra, you can't do calculus, period.

Despite my best efforts in high school

Math is like going to the gym but for your brain. I consider it the most expensive sport that you can play. to do math You may never need anything you learn in math but I know it changes my problem solving abilities for the better. The more Math I know the more creative I can be when solving problems.

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 .

Are the people who never use math high earners? If not, then their complaint actually supports the importance of math.

yeah. they start and run successful small businesses across the country. making millions of dollars. Outside of engineering and accounting, very few professions need math.

I suspect it depends on the age of the students. In grade school when kids are learning to read and do addition, it's hard to imagine anything more core than that and science/history taught at that age is more about getting kids exposed to those concepts rather than actual learning. But once kids get to secondary school and English transitions to British Lit, American Lit and other variations on "read books and write an essays", the actual class time seems much less important than science classes where high school students actually learn the core tenets of Bio, Chem and Physics.

This policy is at an elementary school, but it’s probably a good assumption that a similar policy could adjust in high school for exactly that reason.

It's not about which subjects build on each other. These two are the subjects that have mandated federal testing in the US [1]. Low test scores in reading and math have consequences for schools and their leaders, so they get the priority slots.

[1] https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/every-student-succeeds-act/...

The actual problem began when humans invented candles and lightbulbs and started staying up past 8pm, and going to bed at inconsistent hours, therefore waking up tired the next mornings.

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.

What is really interesting is that human's natural sleep cycle is not to sleep continuously for 8 hours. Our natural sleep cycle is to go to bed when it gets dark and then to wake up for a few hours in the middle of the night and get up and do things (apparently this is also the time when most sex happened since other family members in the same room were still asleep) and then go back to sleep and get back up at dawn.

Does this mean the natural sleep cycle time is a lot less in summer than it is in winter?

Why would other family members had been asleep? Wouldn't this natural sleep cycle have applied to everyone?

I live at 60 degrees Northern latitude, and I sleep a lot more in the winter. And it's really difficult in the summer too, because it never gets dark and you need to go to bed to get up in the morning.

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.

This just applies to adults. Children and teenagers naturally sleep longer than adults and probably slept throughout the night. Plus, apparently people didn't all get up at the same time during the night. Some would be up from midnight-2am, others from 2am-4am, etc.

For those landing on this comment, some reference: http://slumberwise.com/science/your-ancestors-didnt-sleep-li...

If you mean day/night, that's the rotation of the Earth around its axis, not the rotation around the Sun.

For the most part i agree, but how about summer times in the northern regions in US or the world when sun doesnt set until beyond 9pm or say Norway where it can be until midnight or more than 60 days in some areas?

In most of the US, during elementary school, you generally have 1 teacher throughout the day that teaches all subjects, and you only leave to go to PE, art, or music once per day.

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.

> 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.

> There's a reason schools have multiple periods of each course, and that those periods rotate day-to-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.

At least where I went to school, teachers generally had full schedules with maybe one period empty for prep. If they are teaching multiple sections of the same class, it isn't feasible to lump all classes of a certain kind into one part of the day. The same person can't teach multiple classes at once.

Because a single PE teacher can manage five rotating classes of twenty kids throughout the day. If kids didn't rotate periods, then all 100 kids would take PE at the same time. That would require extra PE teachers, because one teacher cannot manage 100 kids. Multiply this effect by every different area (music teachers, art teachers, etc.) and you have to hire a bunch of extra teachers which is a waste of money. Plus, those teachers would only be busy for part of the day, so their wasting a lot of their time.

These specialized teachers are non-existent in many schools. You may have a PE teacher, but they may or may not already be full time. Art teacher? LOL

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.

> That would require extra PE teachers

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.

Everyone keeps saying PE but imagine 1 math teacher trying to teach 150 kids at once. Not effective with traditional teaching. We already struggle with overly large class sizes making it harder to teach.

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com