Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

I vehemently disagree with this. The problem is that there are only 24 hours in the day. That's just not enough time to go to school, sleep 9.25 hours (recommended for teens, as I've been told), and still participate in sports, do homework, and (god forbid) play video games.

This would only move the problem later, not solve it. Even worse, parents would have to move around their own work schedules to get kids to school on time. The real problem, in my opinion, is the massive unchecked amounts of homework that get piled on students every year. Each teacher thinks that their amount of homework is reasonable but it only takes one bad teacher to cripple a kid's schedule. Writing a 5-6 page paper in middle school never taught anyone anything, but it did take away time that could have been used constructively.

View on HN

What is the "this" that you don't agree with? The theorized causality? It's not a question of whether the kids in the Seattle study slept more or not. They did sleep more. The question is why, and I think most people agree that it is clearly because of the later school start time.

> This would only move the problem later, not solve it.

And for teens, that would be a huge improvement. Their sleep schedules are biologically offset to be about 2 hours later than and adult's [0] so the different between having to wake up at say 08:30 instead of 07:30 is the equivalent, for an adult, to waking up at 06:30 instead of 05:30.

> The problem is that there are only 24 hours in the day.

That's also a problem but it's a different problem. Even if we reduce the workload, sleep still can't be healthy because teenagers are being forced to consistently wake up at biologically unnatural times.

[0]: https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/sleep-and-teens

What do you disagree with? This is something that actually happened. They changed start times and the students slept more.

As a datapoint, I once wrote a paper for biology and learned about the existence of salt-rising bread [0], a bread leavened by hydrogen instead of the usual carbon dioxide, with a bacteria known for food poisoning as the rising agent [1]. It is just trivia, of course, though...

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-rising_bread

[1]: https://www.popsci.com/article/science/clostridium-it-can-ki...

There's a study that indicates that your theory is either incorrect or incomplete, as grades improved with a 1 hour delay in school start time. What part of the study do you not find convincing?

Except, kids in the UK seem to manage fine. Here, both primary (4/5 to 11/12) and secondary (12/13 to 17/18) start at 09h00 and have done so for a long time with no detrimental effects. Although, there are apparently plans for some secondary schools to instead start at 10h00, so there is that...!

Writing a 5-6 page paper in middle school never taught anyone anything, but it did take away time that could have been used constructively.

Is this seriously something that a HN user would write?

I'm sure that I could find a single example of a research paper assignment "teaching" a middle schooler something. I bet I could find a million of those examples too.

Students being given too much homework is a separate issue.

Students' circadian rhythm is shifted later compared to adults. Why shouldn't we let them sleep later? Why do you disagree with this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com