Hacker News Reader

Comment by cassac | Hacker News Reader

This is only because people like to wake up at the last second and are still groggy during class. If you have an 8am class don’t get up at 7:55am, get up at 6:30am. You may like it less but you’ll be awake for class and you’ll do better. I don’t know at what point we decided these kids have to have everything done exactly optimal for them with no deviance to make their life harder but it explains a lot about how incapable they are when they do encounter hardships. You may now remove yourself from my lawn.

View on HN

Sure, you can say "college students should get up at 6:30 and also get sufficient sleep, so they should go to bed at 22:00". But actually making that happen is much harder than just moving classes by an hour or two.

Of course you could argue about the anciliary benefits of teaching people to wake up early, and how that prepares them for society. But if all you care about are measures like academic performance and sleep duration (which in turn is linked to health), removing 8am classes provides better results.

The problem is you don’t remove 8am classes, you reschedule them. And since prof time is a finite resource, they would now be at a new late time that could not actually be represented in the study. So is a new class later than the latest class better? I doubt it. I bet once you make 9am the earliest class now they will get up at 8:55 and be tired again.

It’s only hard to tell the new adult-children to go to bed earlier because they have lived their lives without ever being told to go to bed earlier.

I find HN, while progressive, is full of people who can’t function without their latte at 8am but enjoy living off the benefits of all the people that do have to get up early. Everyone at a coffee shop, people working 2nd and 3rd shifts, snow plow drivers, nurses, bus drivers, etc etc. A rule for me and a rule for thee I guess.

You’re aware that people’s circadian rhythms don’t align? I, for instance, am a morning person. Morning classes were never a problem for me but evening seminars were hell. My wife is the opposite, shifted about five hours, a “night owl”. It’s not as simple as insufficient planning or personal discipline.

I am aware but I think that 8am is not early enough for that to be a major driver. I think it is as simple as insufficient planning and personal discipline.

I think it is as simple as insufficient planning and personal discipline.

Even if we accept that, shouldn't universities try to make it as easy as they can for students to learn. Adding pointless hurdles, and then blaming lack of discipline for your inability to scale them, just seems kind of daft. Unless of course you believe that learning to show up on time no matter what and meeting hard arbitrary deadlines is the secret real skill being taught by higher education.

I think having to make an early morning class is part of the learning process. I don’t think they should cater to them at all and believe it would actually be a disservice to do so.

I’m also not trying to blame the students, but instead the enablers. The students aren’t being told to get up earlier, they are being told the classes are too early, which reinforces their bad attitude about it and is probably why they still show up late.

Okay, well, you're entitled to your opinion.

If you're groggy for more than a few minutes after waking up it is probably indicative of poor quality/amount of sleep. Not saying everyone is 100% at that point, but you should be able to focus on things after waking and going to class shortly thereafter.

Maybe groggy wasn’t right. I think what I meant is most people like to have a morning routine. Read the paper, read HN, have a bagel, things like that. If you plan to get up early and skip your morning routine you will be distracted. So when you get up early, get up early enough to include your morning routine. You can skip it but mentally you will feel it.

> This is only because people like to wake up at the last second and are still groggy during class.m

I didn’t see that data in the study.

You didn’t, but the study did talk about people skipping class, probably do to over sleeping.

What does oversleeping through an early class have to do with not waking up early enough?

You are right I can only try to infer information from them that’s not provided. I would infer there is a distribution of when people get up and the 8am classes have the largest set of people getting up nearest to the class start time. Some of the people get up very early and the other end is people up so late they miss the class. The later the class the more people are awake so the better the performance. I’m saying the data they do provide does not refute my take on it.

Sure, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that getting up earlier is not equivalent to a later class.

But this study is asserting that the earliest 8am class, of a system that runs 8am to 4pm, has the worst performance.

It can’t say that a 9am class in a system of 9am to 5pm would have better performance at 9am, and it certainly can’t say that the system as a whole would have better performance. Maybe 5pm is too late and affects child care or dinner or night jobs and now students are distracted all over again.

There is way more research than just this study that links early starts to poorer educational performance.

Your speculations have nothing to do with anything in the study, depend on facts that are not supported by any research, and are contradicted by other studies on this topic.

Can you provide some? None of those studies ever say “go to bed earlier and wake up earlier” they always say “shoulder shrug make things later”.

A good starting point would be the pretty broad research on circadian rhythms if you want to know more.

Surely nobody is waking up 5 minutes ahead of class if they have to travel to school/work.

Since most live on campus, at least in the US, I bet they can do that. I would love to see this sliced by commuter students because I bet they’d have it together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com