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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> We wake up students too early

Based on what you just said, if we moved school to 10am, you would just stay up until 4am playing StarCraft.

I don't think school is too early. I think you just stayed up too late.

I don't think this is true. When I was younger, I only could fall asleep at ~2am. I went to multiple schools with starting times varying from 5am to 12pm, it never made a difference.

I just wasn't tired until 2am no matter what.

Maybe you're one of the very few genetic outliers. If you're never tired until 2am, and got up at say 6am for school then you're never tired on 4 hours sleep? I wish I was good on 4 hours sleep and never tired.

Did you use artificial light anytime after the sun went down?

Wouldn't one assume the folks use artificial light? People have been doing this well before electricity, especially during the winter. Doubly so up north. There simply isn't enough day here during the winter to do otherwise. Heck, my sunset time today is estimated at 16:22. I'll not have eaten dinner yet.

Is your whole house a big window? Where I'm from we always have light inside

By that logic, if we moved school to 5 am, he would have simply only stayed up until 10 pm. Is that particularly realistic?

>By that logic, if we moved school to 5 am, he would have simply only stayed up until 10 pm.

I believe that.

>Is that particularly realistic?

The only issue is that at 5am, there won't be daylight during the winter. Lack of daylight presents safety issues and makes it more difficult to wake up.

It's pretty well studied that most teenagers stay up late.

My freshman year of high school my school was under construction so I was bussed across town. Which meant I had to wake up close to 5am. I don't remember staying up especially late, but I was perpetually tired. Id sleep on the bus both ways.

In college I had a semester when I had a 5am class. I found it much easier to stay up all night and crash after than to wake up for class.

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/teens-and-sleep

A 5am class? That sounds insane! What was the justification for that time?

This "most teenagers stay up late" must be unique to U.S./European teenagers with access to computers, video games, mobile phones, internet and lax parental supervision. As someone who went to boarding school from age 14-18 years where sleep and wake up time was well regulated I can tell you for a fact that we all looked forward to sleep time. Most students preferred waking up earlier to study to take advantage of the quiet and focus.

YMMV, but I'm not sure that would be the case. As a teen, I had early morning seminary before high school each morning with other teens for church and we all had to get up between 4:30 and 5:00 but very few of us would go to bed before midnight. It was rough, but this anecdata fuels my bias for believing that most people feel like there aren't enough hours in the day and will stay up as late as they can in order to do what they please with whatever small amount of time is afforded to them each day.

To be clear, this wasn't just my seminary class- this is the way teens in the seminary program have handled it for years and years, so it may not be the biggest but it's definitely not the smallest sample size available.

Again, YMMV. I openly admit that I'm biased in my thinking because of the anecdata.

I've never lived somewhere that had decent daylight in the morning. When I lived in the states, it wasn't light outside until 8am or something in the winter. I now live in Norway, and december days are less than 5 hours long where I am - and the light isn't very strong.

Perhaps 5am is just a difficult time to wake up.

Haha, you'd like our winters then. If you look out during lectures you might catch the brief sunlight.

This is going back a fair few years for me, but I always thought school was too early! Perhaps you just didn't stay in bed for long enough? If you just wake up later, your bedtime will naturally end up later to compensate.

"All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined -- but the time at which they wake up is socially determined"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212140741.h...

Poor logic. We sleep eventually.

Yes, and if we stay awake playing video game tournaments and staring at a computer screen, that's usually the point of complete exhaustion.

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