>We wake up students too early
I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.
I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.
- My parents wouldn't leave me alone for very long in the evenings, so I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to really concentrate until they were off to bed - My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus.
The first trait was obviously correctable and probably circumstantial, but the second feels far more innate. I just focus better right after the sun goes down, and I'm not really sure why. It's like all the stress from the day melts away, and I get a chance to finally be myself for a few hours. So, I work an evening shift (my work day starts at noon and gets out quite late) and I couldn't be happier for it.
It's a shame that this combination is both common, and regarded as lazy by society at large, because it seems to be quite the opposite. I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people. I wish that we were generally more accepting of these traits, because if I hadn't had the good fortune to stumble into a job with such a well-aligned shift, I would still be struggling to sleep properly most nights.
Not saying this isn't your natural predisposition, but FWIW this is pretty much exactly what happens to everyone with a disrupted sleep schedule. Or any disrupted normal cycle, really[1]. Probably the large majority of people have experienced this.
[1]: Fasting is one example- you will be starving by lunch or dinner, but if you wait a few hours longer the hunger will go away pretty much entirely. You may feel sluggish and slow when you're hungry, but once your brain realizes you aren't going to eat you will feel lighter and more energetic. If your body needs to go past its normal cycles, your brain will give you the resources to do so. The hunger and tiredness you feel normally are more like periodic maintenance reminders.
My current adult strategy is to simply plan for 7.5 hours of sleep each night; this gets me well rested consistently and doesn't appear to have any negative side effects. So long as I get the sleep in at some point, it doesn't seem to matter all that much when in the day it is. I could shift to mornings (and worked retail this way for years), but it's harder to maintain; 2am just feels "normal" to me. So, given the choice, I'll start the day later and wake up rested.
Have you ever tried shifting to mornings? I used to think as you and started getting up early (and going to bed earlier), and was much more productive. My focus in particular was much higher because there so much fewer distractions.
Not saying this is you, but I had an old boss who thought he did his best work at night. Except, I had to come in every morning and fix all the bugs he introduced during his late night coding sessions. Being tired made him think he was making better decisions than he was which is inline with the adage that driving tired is like driving under the influence.
On the plus side, if something has to get done, I don't mind staying until 10 pm too much.
It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.
Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.
This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point.
If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm.
Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.
I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.
Babies don't have a clock.
Whether my choices were wise is not too important. What's important is that I almost failed mathematics because of my poor choices.
If every other teenager makes equally stupid choices, causing them to not learn vital skills, we should still change up the system. Teenagers will teenage, build the system around it!
If you do a sport in highschool you basically have to be able to get 4 hours of sleep and deal with it
This leaves you 4-5 hours depending on how long it takes you to get ready. This is more than enough to do homework, though some days definitely sucked more than others. In my opinion it helped develop valuable time management skills.
I don't mind sports, but the way it's placed on a pedestal in the US above all other activities is ridiculous to me. Not keen on homework that takes over after school hours either.
After football season I got out of school at 3.
Also, why the fuck is it "impossible" to socialize with family and neighbors at 6pm? They are probably at work until 5pm anyways. By the time someone is old enough to play football they should already know how to cook.
I started playing football (a different one to what OP meant, I'm guessing), at the age of... 2. Definitely not old enough to cook then.
Good luck convincing most male teenagers that they need to learn to cook for themselves, too. I've only picked up those skills in the last few years, and I'm almost done with university!
News reports claim high school students are assigned 3.5 hours of homework per weeknight.
(e.g. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2014-mar-01-la-ol-too... )
For my part, I still play video games, slept through most of school, got kicked out, taught myself to program at 22, and have been working in the field for 14 years now. I won't take a job with a strict in-time because I know I have a hard time getting to bed early.
I'm not bashing video games, but you have to take some responsibility. School at 10 wouldn't work well for a variety of reasons, even if I wish it were possible.