I used to need 9.5 hours of sleep as a teenager and probably had diagnosable delayed sleep phase disorder.
Rules made by 55 year old early risers that only need 6 hours of sleep a night who have become school officials are just cruel and unusual punishment to a chunk of teenagers out there. In a better world there could be a class action lawsuit to make this stop--but its still considered okay to promote "early to bed, early to rise" and flat-out discriminate against people with sleep disorders.
If you are an early riser, you should know that as someone with a sleep disorder I view "helpful" suggestions like "get some exercise" to be roughly equivalent to suggesting that gay people just need to pray the gay away. I'm never going to become an early riser. I've gotten in somewhat under control with melatonin, tweaks to diet and consistent scheduling, but I'm never going to hop out of bed at 6:30am and its always going to take me 2-3 hours to wake up.
Allow me to back this up with an actual piece of research.
Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )
> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by
genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.
Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy,
based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall
asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on
the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly,
they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to
a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather
their genetic fate.
Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.
EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!
I used to believe like you do. What I believed to be my natural schedule--what I naturally gravitated to--was the nite-owl 1am to between 9-10am or so sleep schedule. In school, I always felt sleep deprived when I had to wake up around 6.
But I recently spent the better part of five months going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4:30am. Despite getting less sleep overall, I've never felt as well rested or alert throughout the day as I did during those five months and I've never had an easier time getting to sleep. The key, for me, was also modifying my eating schedule and screen usage (computer, phone, TV). I often wonder how many people who simply accept that they're naturally nite owls are using blue-light-emitting screens late into the night and eating their last meal of the day so late that their body isn't ready for sleep. Because I know that once I adjusted those aspects of my life, my sleep schedule magically responded.
The difficulty in maintaining that schedule has been societal pressures. Those five months were spent living outside of a city where noise, light and social norms around dinner time all make it very difficult to maintain while having any sort of social life. I'm still searching for a way to reconcile my sleep schedule with my intended lifestyle.
> Rules made by 55 year old early risers that only need 6 hours of sleep a night who have become school officials are just cruel and unusual punishment to a chunk of teenagers out there. In a better world there could be a class action lawsuit to make this stop--but its still considered okay to promote "early to bed, early to rise" and flat-out discriminate against people with sleep disorders.
tbh, i doubt the time that students are required to be at school has much to do with their ideal sleep schedules. only about a third of women are stay at home moms these days, so you can consider parents to fall into one of two groups: shift workers and 9-5 office workers. shifts can start/end at any time so they can't really be planned around at the level of an entire school system. so by default, the schedule gets planned with the assumption of both parents working 9-5s. if both parents have to be at work by 9:00, the kids need to be at school by 8:00, so the parents can drop them off or at least make sure they get on the bus.
also, a lot of school districts only have enough buses to transport all the lower, middle, or high school students at once, so their arrivals must be staggered.
given that school also serves the purpose of gov't sponsored day care, i'm not sure what they could really do better aside from granting tardiness allowances for students with bona-fide sleeping disorders.
Honest question: Have you tried waking up at the same time every day -- absolutely NO exceptions -- for a period of 2+ weeks? (Along with this, no snoozing and get up as quickly as possible after your alarm goes off, even if you're a zombie and won't be able to actually do anything for another hour or two).
I ask as a person who's been on both sides of the fence, from 8pm nights and 4am mornings to 4am nights and 1pm "mornings" (and, of course, all manner of ranges in between). I've had months where I'm alert and out of bed 15 seconds after the alarm rings, and months where it takes me 2+ hours to rely wake up (although, on the whole, I'd still consider myself a "morning person", since I tend to feel better and get more done when I'm on the early shift).
I've found that, no matter what time I'm waking up, my ability to start moving in the "morning" is dependent in huge part (55%) on a consistent wake up time, and in small part dependent on getting enough sleep (20%) and getting up immediately instead of snoozing or otherwise staying horizontal (25%). Percentages are non-scientific estimates.
I do acknowledge, it's hard as hell to transition to being a "morning person" when I haven't been for a while, because it's just SO hard to force myself out of bed for the 1-2 week period I need to aclimate. Especially since in a half-awake state I don't have much mental capacity to push through the sleepiness. And it would be harder if I'd never experienced easy mornings to know they're possible.
For the record, to preempt a rebuttle along these lines: I also don't dispute that some people, for whatever reason -- genetics, life circumstances, etc -- may just not be able to make the switch. I am curious whether whether it's a matter of "I've done the above and it had no effect on me" or "The above is just impossible for me."
6:30AM is just some other city's 11:30AM... the difference in between is just light exposure, food consumption, and activity (the three big zeitgebers).
Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world, it's pretty obvious that your wake and sleep time would have to be a lot more malleable than you suggest.
Just throwing in my anecdata, used to be a late riser (often after ten), had a kid and now I wake up a bit after six. Sleeping in is after eight. I just have to get up when he does.
If I had to guess, I'd wonder if school conventionally starts early because pre-teens are up early.
One of the many fascinating facts I learnt from Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" is that the biorhythms of teenagers are shifted to later hours compared to those of adults in all human cultures of the globe, even in those rare societies hardly affected by technology. In evolution this was likely beneficial to make it easier for teenagers to socialize among themselves without adult disturbance, which was necessary to drive their tribe out of its ruts, to pioneer innovation and adaptation to changed conditions. In modern society we are stupid to undermine this by depriving the upcoming generation of their sleep.
My high school started at 7:45am, unless I had zero period, in which case it was 7am. Throughout the entire four years I was there, I was never able to get my sleep schedule to match up. I would wake up at 6am groggy, irritable, and stupid. This would not change throughout the day, and I'm sure many people thought I was just an idiotic asshole all the time. Sometimes I could catch a nap at lunch.
After school, I would immediately pass out for 2-3 hours, and wake with tons of energy. I wouldn't be able to fall asleep until around 2am because of this, and then the cycle continued.
Now as an engineer with a much more flexible schedule that lets me sleep in, I'm a more attentive, happier, and smarter. I'm convinced that if I had gone to a school with a schedule that matched mine, I would have achieved much more.
> Changing the operating hours of an institution so central to the community is far from easy. It requires strong leadership and adjustments by school bus companies and businesses offering services like child care and extracurricular clubs.
Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings.
I'd say a lack of public commitment to child care is also a big reason for the low rate of young people having children commentators like to wring their hands about.
>Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings.
I've always been under the impression that start times were staggered for transportation reasons, as you can't drop everyone off at the same time. My experiences are limited to small towns, so I could be way off, but the differences seemed too small for sibling care to be the motive
I have a suspicion that after-school sports is one of the reasons school starts so early. If high school let out between 5 and 6 pm, then that would leave not as much time for sports.
There is a high school in Texas with a $72 million dollar stadium. That should be indicative of where the priorities are.
> Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings.
That's an interesting postulation, but is it born out by societies where most families have a single child?
What were the child care options like at the time that the current school hours were developed (I'm guessing this is close to a century ago).
Do all relatively-civilised societies have the same attitude towards school hours and public commitment to child care?
If not, then trying to identify some correlations would be informative.
My gut feel is it's entirely unrelated to older siblings looking after younger ones -- partly because if both are at school at the same time, that problem is already solved.
I suspect the root cause is probably something more simple -- at the time school hours were decided, schools / education departments looked to how it was done elsewhere, be it neighbouring schools / states, or failing that, simply aligning the hours with what was commonly regarded as a 'good honest day's work'.
Clearly this would all have been a long time before anyone knew about, let alone considered, age-specific circadian rhythm variations.
Jesus, we know more than enough about it now -- the damage lack of sleep does to adults, and its profound importance through development especially in the teenage years -- and yet it'll be at least a decade before even the more progressive western societies shift teenage school hours forward by a few hours.
"public" meaning what. Both legally and socially, caring for children is mandatory.
We had a breakdown of extended family structure (aunts watching the kids for an hour or two) and neighborhoods (same but for elderly neighbors, sometimes compensated). Everyone knows child care is labor intensive. Nobody knows how to pay for it is all.
Well, no one else has said it, so I guess I drew the short straw.
Teenagers are most likely wired for later nights because they have reached initial fertility. They will sneak off in the night to fool around, especially if they haven't had a child yet. At the risk of sounding patronizing, this is how babies are made. Adolescence is the age when women would first become pregnant, and the ancient's concept of marriage was probably not the same as ours. (There is evidence of monogamistic tendencies in humans for a long time but that isn't synonymous with marriage.)
Teenagers are biologically wired to want lots of sex and they tend to do it at night. I would put a lot of money on the fact that that hasn't changed in millennia.
Obviously, this is a critical aspect of the process that allows for the continuation of the human race. Humans didn't have the consistent ability to wait to reproduce until 30 as is common now. And probably not the desire too; I can't see career-building interfering.
The initial party must have ended pretty quickly. Poor ancient teeenagers.
(Edit: considering this speculative is reasonable and factually correct. But speculating there's been behavior change is currently more speculative. What reason do we have to think teens had daytime sex in ancient times and our behavior has changed? What about for mature adults? Never heard of an existing tribal culture that mostly has sex during the day, and that's how we get much of our anthropological evidence.
Humans tend to have sex at night, and the most fertile, desirious and energetic would be wired to spend more time at the time people have sex doing it: that would be selected for because of our primary biological directive. Is there a more logical evolutionary reason?)
Aren't you simply making a baseless guess with nothing to back it up? Why would there be biological pressure to mate at night? I don't understand how you're so self assured (unless you read something on this which I haven't, in which case please share :)) If you don't, then I don't understand the purpose of phrases such as
>The article misses the point almost to the point of absurdity.
I'm not sure this is true. Yes, adolescence is when childbearing ability and the associated hormonal incentives start, but where is this "sex must happen at night" component coming from? If anything, I would guess that's a modern phenomenon being retrofitted onto the past.
I, and I assume most guys (and gals) in their puberty were horny most of the time, but my being a night owl I don't think factored into that at all. I studied much better at night, I was a lot more creative (music mostly) at night, and everything was more peaceful at night. I was horny too, I guess, but that was more of a 24/7 thing.
> ...no competing theory that does have hard evidence has been proposed, so current behavior is actually the first rationalization.
I think it would be even more reasonable to investigate WHY this is being discovered now rather than a long time ago. What has changed in the lives of teens now compared to 3 or 4 decades ago?
I suspect one thing is a much higher percentage of "structured time". Teens today seem to have far more time obligations than my generation did. As a result, socializing and free-time ends up getting pushed to interstitial times, late at night _and_ online.
Young people need unstructured time for ad-hoc socializing and discovering who they are and there is less opportunity for that now so it happens later at night when their obligations have been met and the time is their own. That's a simpler explanation than primate sexual urges.
Very slight digression. I can't stop thinking that modern 'college' oriented societies forgot to take biology into account.
IMO teenage perception of the world, which triggers the frenzy need to act, create, be seen; this is how I interpret pseudonyms and graffiti for instance.
A century ago, the average independance was ~16, similarly some religion have rites of passage in mid teens to signal a change of status. I think they did notice there was a need for teens to change lifestyle.
This teenager sleep cycle thing is a bit of a revelation to me. I thought I just had bad habits, but when I was that age, I'd play games most of the evening, maybe do one or two bits of homework at 10om, and then possibly stay up to 1am with some essay that I'd procrastinate on for ages. I'd wake up at something like 7am and sleep on the train until I got into school, and then sleep after getting home at about 4pm for an hour or two.
It would have been a lot more comfortable getting in for maybe 10am and leaving at 5pm. I remember sometimes you'd have a special day in the week where there were no classes in the morning, meaning you started late. And then maybe an extra lesson or activity in the evening. But similar length of day, shifted, felt much better.
Having worked for longer than I went to school for now, I think the school calendar needs an overhaul. There's no reason to take a huge holiday in the summer. In fact, why have any holiday at all? Just have school on all the time, and let people take holidays whenever they want, like at work. You won't forget things as easily taking week or two week holidays as against 8 week ones. Also it means parents won't have their holidays dictated by the school.
Within the day, I also wonder about the frequency of context switches. You might be taking 6 classes a day: PE, French, Math, English, History, Physics.
Now image you are coding, and you do this: Troubleshoot the rendering issue on the website, install a lock free ring on your trading system, write a SIMD function in CUDA, fix your cmake file dependencies, add unit tests to your CI script, and set up Kubernetes.
Would you do those things one at a time, or in little pieces where you have to pick up where you left off arbitrarily?
It seems you should have large blocks, maybe just morning and afternoon, rather than dozens of little classes each week.
But then possibly as a teenager concentration is an issue, I don't know. I certainly think it's better to focus on one thing at a time, quite a long time, before changing contexts.
I wonder if it'd just be easier for high schools to convert over to a college model: students are free to pick courses corresponding to their preferred times, and to leave and enter campus on will. Of course, there will be incentives to consider -- why would a high schooler attend their classes if they're not paying directly out of pocket? In contrast, a school district would try to maximize the attendance rate as that's how funding works (at least in California).
In hindsight, there's always a tension between high schoolers and those who administrate them; it's never a partnership since teenagers are quick to abuse / misuse a privilege.
This seems like a great way to kill the public secondary school system. What percentage of kids do you estimate would stop going to class under this model?
That's how it works in Finland in lukio (upper secondary school between 9th grade and university), we picked the courses ourselves and left/entered campus on will. Looks like the course-based system was introduced in 1982.
And personally I did prefer course instances that were later on the day over those that were earlier.
We still had mandatory lesson attendance, though, unlike most university courses.
> students are free to pick courses corresponding to their preferred times, and to leave and enter campus on will.
I was doing this as a senior in HS in the 90s. Because I had been ahead since elementary school, by the time I was a senior in HS there were only a couple classes left I needed to take. I showed up late, left early and most days went to work.
This was actually an opinion piece a while back that seemingly got updated around the actual news [1]: Governor Brown vetoed the bill in California to start at 8:30 AM or later.
I'm an early riser, always has been. My brother and mother are night owls but I somehow got my father's gene for getting up very early in the morning. All through high school I had a long walk to the train and had to get up at 6. I don't think I was ever late because of my tardiness. Today when I get to work at 8.30 I've already done my workout and some work on hobby stuff. This has been the case since my early 20s.
On the flip side, staying up late at night is absolutely horrible. I love hackathons and have been to three of them with my colleagues this year and I'm always such a buzz kill when I have to get some sleep past midnight. I wake up and a lot of the best code has already been written by them.
We're all different. I wish society was more adapted to people of all configurations, with more adaptable work schedules. And party schedules, even though missing out on them is not as bad as all the ways night owls are judged as lazy by ignorant people.
I'm not sure I like the reasoning in this article. They go to bed later because of FB and other stuff, which makes them not have enough sleep before school. Then it's the school, rather than the FB-ing that has to give way?
If they wake up and start school later, what's to say their FB-ing won't shift even later, causing them to sleep even later, and then again we're back where we started?
I was in a boarding school with hundreds of other teenagers. My classmates never* slept in (always attended the first class), and I’ve never seen anyone sleeping in from other classes/groups. We went to classes and were in a good shape, I don’t recall anyone complaining.
There was one exception - a classmate that I believe was secretely drinking alcohol. Even for him it was an exception to sleep in. Also I’ve see the monitor looking for the sleepers, like that guy, so the problem was not entirely unknown.
We were not selected based on our sleep, but on academic performance. This was long ago and we were poor enough to allow no electronic devices whatsoever, alcohol was forbidden, and lights-out were strictly enforced. Not much spare food either after dinner.
The “teenage owl” thing has to be almost entirely environmental in order to explain my experience.
What were the consequences (both formal and informal) if a student slept in?
People can do things that are both unpleasant and harmful to them for extended periods of time if subjected to sufficient coercion, social pressure, or reward.
> Anyone who talks about sleep as if it’s some kind of inconvenience and getting less of it is a virtue should be challenged. These people are dangerous.
This statement was bizarrely totalitarian. I actually agree with the fundamental premise that many schools probably start too early. But to say those who take the other side are dangerous people who need to be challenged? Too far.
Ironically, I think this Soviet-esque mentality that "people who disagree with idea X are dangerous" is dangerous!
Wouldn't the average teenager just stay up even longer? It's not like they are hardcoded to wake up at a certain clock time.
I think it would make much more sense to change the content of school during those years to reflect the interests of students better. Let them take a break, do something practical, do projects, etc. instead of trying to cram facts into their heads. A lot of stuff I headed to learn when I was 13 I learned easily 5 years later, and vice versa.
This is nothing new. What's more irritating to me is that these articles generate lots of conversation, but not one school will adjust its hours. Put up or shut up.
>Three out of every four students in grades 9 to 12 fail to sleep the minimum of eight hours that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for their age group
Do 3/4 teens fail in life? Do they develop debilitating disorders and such?
I guess I've heard for years we need more sleep yet we don't sleep and we continue living. May be certain things like stress and work are troublesome and such but that seems more like the issue than lack of sleep is.
Low sleep seems to correlate with disorders like diabetes, obesity, and cancer, which are definitely disorders of modernity. It also impairs cognitive performance in lab studies. Going through the book Why We Sleep right now and it’s eye opening for sure.
It’s not necessarily that they become failures but rather that they are being deprived of the mental capacity to reach their full potential every day.
They would be more successful if they got more sleep, so it makes sense to give teens a couple more hours to benefit society as a whole, even if only marginally.
On my way to work today I saw a couple of school buses picking up students at about 6:45. Now if you think that's too early and we should have schools open later, I see a real problem. By law where I live, all traffic, in both directions, has to stop when school buses pick up kids. Put those buses on the road between 8:00 and 9:00 and the already horrible rush hour traffic would get way worse. Along with making everyone's commute longer, every school bus route would take longer. Students would have to be picked up earlier relative to the school's opening time to allow for the slower traffic.
One problem for adults in the US at least, the center of gravity for many institutions is on the East Coast, New York for finance or DC for the government. Huge numbers of people on the west coast start their workday at 6a or 7a to align to accommodate east coast peers or organizations. If the European settlement of the US had been done in reverse, I can easily see a world where Virginians are regularly staying at work till 8p because that’s when their customer is available.
My daughter's school just changed all lessons to start an hour later for a few cohorts, as an experiment. My daughter likes that she gets to sleep longer. But it also means we don't get to see each other at breakfast, however brief that is.
I'm worried that more or less halving the number of times we see each other will have an impact on social cohesion. Of course, one solution would be for everyone to just started an hour later. Or two :-)
[+] [-] lamontcg|7 years ago|reply
Rules made by 55 year old early risers that only need 6 hours of sleep a night who have become school officials are just cruel and unusual punishment to a chunk of teenagers out there. In a better world there could be a class action lawsuit to make this stop--but its still considered okay to promote "early to bed, early to rise" and flat-out discriminate against people with sleep disorders.
If you are an early riser, you should know that as someone with a sleep disorder I view "helpful" suggestions like "get some exercise" to be roughly equivalent to suggesting that gay people just need to pray the gay away. I'm never going to become an early riser. I've gotten in somewhat under control with melatonin, tweaks to diet and consistent scheduling, but I'm never going to hop out of bed at 6:30am and its always going to take me 2-3 hours to wake up.
[+] [-] devxpy|7 years ago|reply
Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )
> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate. Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.
EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!
[+] [-] curun1r|7 years ago|reply
But I recently spent the better part of five months going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4:30am. Despite getting less sleep overall, I've never felt as well rested or alert throughout the day as I did during those five months and I've never had an easier time getting to sleep. The key, for me, was also modifying my eating schedule and screen usage (computer, phone, TV). I often wonder how many people who simply accept that they're naturally nite owls are using blue-light-emitting screens late into the night and eating their last meal of the day so late that their body isn't ready for sleep. Because I know that once I adjusted those aspects of my life, my sleep schedule magically responded.
The difficulty in maintaining that schedule has been societal pressures. Those five months were spent living outside of a city where noise, light and social norms around dinner time all make it very difficult to maintain while having any sort of social life. I'm still searching for a way to reconcile my sleep schedule with my intended lifestyle.
[+] [-] leetcrew|7 years ago|reply
tbh, i doubt the time that students are required to be at school has much to do with their ideal sleep schedules. only about a third of women are stay at home moms these days, so you can consider parents to fall into one of two groups: shift workers and 9-5 office workers. shifts can start/end at any time so they can't really be planned around at the level of an entire school system. so by default, the schedule gets planned with the assumption of both parents working 9-5s. if both parents have to be at work by 9:00, the kids need to be at school by 8:00, so the parents can drop them off or at least make sure they get on the bus.
also, a lot of school districts only have enough buses to transport all the lower, middle, or high school students at once, so their arrivals must be staggered.
given that school also serves the purpose of gov't sponsored day care, i'm not sure what they could really do better aside from granting tardiness allowances for students with bona-fide sleeping disorders.
[+] [-] smichel17|7 years ago|reply
I ask as a person who's been on both sides of the fence, from 8pm nights and 4am mornings to 4am nights and 1pm "mornings" (and, of course, all manner of ranges in between). I've had months where I'm alert and out of bed 15 seconds after the alarm rings, and months where it takes me 2+ hours to rely wake up (although, on the whole, I'd still consider myself a "morning person", since I tend to feel better and get more done when I'm on the early shift).
I've found that, no matter what time I'm waking up, my ability to start moving in the "morning" is dependent in huge part (55%) on a consistent wake up time, and in small part dependent on getting enough sleep (20%) and getting up immediately instead of snoozing or otherwise staying horizontal (25%). Percentages are non-scientific estimates.
I do acknowledge, it's hard as hell to transition to being a "morning person" when I haven't been for a while, because it's just SO hard to force myself out of bed for the 1-2 week period I need to aclimate. Especially since in a half-awake state I don't have much mental capacity to push through the sleepiness. And it would be harder if I'd never experienced easy mornings to know they're possible.
For the record, to preempt a rebuttle along these lines: I also don't dispute that some people, for whatever reason -- genetics, life circumstances, etc -- may just not be able to make the switch. I am curious whether whether it's a matter of "I've done the above and it had no effect on me" or "The above is just impossible for me."
[+] [-] dpatrick86|7 years ago|reply
Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world, it's pretty obvious that your wake and sleep time would have to be a lot more malleable than you suggest.
[+] [-] ikfmpwdsoz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] st26|7 years ago|reply
If I had to guess, I'd wonder if school conventionally starts early because pre-teens are up early.
[+] [-] macspoofing|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] devxpy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droopybuns|7 years ago|reply
FWIW: I used to feel this way before I entered my 40’s.
[+] [-] rerx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolashahn|7 years ago|reply
After school, I would immediately pass out for 2-3 hours, and wake with tons of energy. I wouldn't be able to fall asleep until around 2am because of this, and then the cycle continued.
Now as an engineer with a much more flexible schedule that lets me sleep in, I'm a more attentive, happier, and smarter. I'm convinced that if I had gone to a school with a schedule that matched mine, I would have achieved much more.
[+] [-] emodendroket|7 years ago|reply
Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings.
I'd say a lack of public commitment to child care is also a big reason for the low rate of young people having children commentators like to wring their hands about.
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|7 years ago|reply
I've always been under the impression that start times were staggered for transportation reasons, as you can't drop everyone off at the same time. My experiences are limited to small towns, so I could be way off, but the differences seemed too small for sibling care to be the motive
[+] [-] bootlooped|7 years ago|reply
There is a high school in Texas with a $72 million dollar stadium. That should be indicative of where the priorities are.
[+] [-] Jedd|7 years ago|reply
That's an interesting postulation, but is it born out by societies where most families have a single child?
What were the child care options like at the time that the current school hours were developed (I'm guessing this is close to a century ago).
Do all relatively-civilised societies have the same attitude towards school hours and public commitment to child care?
If not, then trying to identify some correlations would be informative.
My gut feel is it's entirely unrelated to older siblings looking after younger ones -- partly because if both are at school at the same time, that problem is already solved.
I suspect the root cause is probably something more simple -- at the time school hours were decided, schools / education departments looked to how it was done elsewhere, be it neighbouring schools / states, or failing that, simply aligning the hours with what was commonly regarded as a 'good honest day's work'.
Clearly this would all have been a long time before anyone knew about, let alone considered, age-specific circadian rhythm variations.
Jesus, we know more than enough about it now -- the damage lack of sleep does to adults, and its profound importance through development especially in the teenage years -- and yet it'll be at least a decade before even the more progressive western societies shift teenage school hours forward by a few hours.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|7 years ago|reply
Where? Everywhere I've lived, high school starts earlier and ends later. They have longer days than the elementary kids.
[+] [-] humanrebar|7 years ago|reply
We had a breakdown of extended family structure (aunts watching the kids for an hour or two) and neighborhoods (same but for elderly neighbors, sometimes compensated). Everyone knows child care is labor intensive. Nobody knows how to pay for it is all.
[+] [-] digitailor|7 years ago|reply
Teenagers are most likely wired for later nights because they have reached initial fertility. They will sneak off in the night to fool around, especially if they haven't had a child yet. At the risk of sounding patronizing, this is how babies are made. Adolescence is the age when women would first become pregnant, and the ancient's concept of marriage was probably not the same as ours. (There is evidence of monogamistic tendencies in humans for a long time but that isn't synonymous with marriage.)
Teenagers are biologically wired to want lots of sex and they tend to do it at night. I would put a lot of money on the fact that that hasn't changed in millennia.
Obviously, this is a critical aspect of the process that allows for the continuation of the human race. Humans didn't have the consistent ability to wait to reproduce until 30 as is common now. And probably not the desire too; I can't see career-building interfering.
The initial party must have ended pretty quickly. Poor ancient teeenagers.
(Edit: considering this speculative is reasonable and factually correct. But speculating there's been behavior change is currently more speculative. What reason do we have to think teens had daytime sex in ancient times and our behavior has changed? What about for mature adults? Never heard of an existing tribal culture that mostly has sex during the day, and that's how we get much of our anthropological evidence.
Humans tend to have sex at night, and the most fertile, desirious and energetic would be wired to spend more time at the time people have sex doing it: that would be selected for because of our primary biological directive. Is there a more logical evolutionary reason?)
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply
>The article misses the point almost to the point of absurdity.
>I feel weird having to explain this.
>Academia concerns me sometimes.
[+] [-] majos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispyambulance|7 years ago|reply
I suspect one thing is a much higher percentage of "structured time". Teens today seem to have far more time obligations than my generation did. As a result, socializing and free-time ends up getting pushed to interstitial times, late at night _and_ online.
Young people need unstructured time for ad-hoc socializing and discovering who they are and there is less opportunity for that now so it happens later at night when their obligations have been met and the time is their own. That's a simpler explanation than primate sexual urges.
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
IMO teenage perception of the world, which triggers the frenzy need to act, create, be seen; this is how I interpret pseudonyms and graffiti for instance.
A century ago, the average independance was ~16, similarly some religion have rites of passage in mid teens to signal a change of status. I think they did notice there was a need for teens to change lifestyle.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lordnacho|7 years ago|reply
It would have been a lot more comfortable getting in for maybe 10am and leaving at 5pm. I remember sometimes you'd have a special day in the week where there were no classes in the morning, meaning you started late. And then maybe an extra lesson or activity in the evening. But similar length of day, shifted, felt much better.
Having worked for longer than I went to school for now, I think the school calendar needs an overhaul. There's no reason to take a huge holiday in the summer. In fact, why have any holiday at all? Just have school on all the time, and let people take holidays whenever they want, like at work. You won't forget things as easily taking week or two week holidays as against 8 week ones. Also it means parents won't have their holidays dictated by the school.
Within the day, I also wonder about the frequency of context switches. You might be taking 6 classes a day: PE, French, Math, English, History, Physics.
Now image you are coding, and you do this: Troubleshoot the rendering issue on the website, install a lock free ring on your trading system, write a SIMD function in CUDA, fix your cmake file dependencies, add unit tests to your CI script, and set up Kubernetes.
Would you do those things one at a time, or in little pieces where you have to pick up where you left off arbitrarily?
It seems you should have large blocks, maybe just morning and afternoon, rather than dozens of little classes each week.
But then possibly as a teenager concentration is an issue, I don't know. I certainly think it's better to focus on one thing at a time, quite a long time, before changing contexts.
[+] [-] QML|7 years ago|reply
In hindsight, there's always a tension between high schoolers and those who administrate them; it's never a partnership since teenagers are quick to abuse / misuse a privilege.
[+] [-] rjbwork|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kchoudhu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkerside|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnssiH|7 years ago|reply
And personally I did prefer course instances that were later on the day over those that were earlier.
We still had mandatory lesson attendance, though, unlike most university courses.
[+] [-] matwood|7 years ago|reply
I was doing this as a senior in HS in the 90s. Because I had been ahead since elementary school, by the time I was a senior in HS there were only a couple classes left I needed to take. I showed up late, left early and most days went to work.
[+] [-] boulos|7 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-school-start-time-...
[+] [-] pimmen|7 years ago|reply
On the flip side, staying up late at night is absolutely horrible. I love hackathons and have been to three of them with my colleagues this year and I'm always such a buzz kill when I have to get some sleep past midnight. I wake up and a lot of the best code has already been written by them.
We're all different. I wish society was more adapted to people of all configurations, with more adaptable work schedules. And party schedules, even though missing out on them is not as bad as all the ways night owls are judged as lazy by ignorant people.
[+] [-] hrasyid|7 years ago|reply
If they wake up and start school later, what's to say their FB-ing won't shift even later, causing them to sleep even later, and then again we're back where we started?
[+] [-] DenisM|7 years ago|reply
There was one exception - a classmate that I believe was secretely drinking alcohol. Even for him it was an exception to sleep in. Also I’ve see the monitor looking for the sleepers, like that guy, so the problem was not entirely unknown.
We were not selected based on our sleep, but on academic performance. This was long ago and we were poor enough to allow no electronic devices whatsoever, alcohol was forbidden, and lights-out were strictly enforced. Not much spare food either after dinner.
The “teenage owl” thing has to be almost entirely environmental in order to explain my experience.
[+] [-] Zak|7 years ago|reply
People can do things that are both unpleasant and harmful to them for extended periods of time if subjected to sufficient coercion, social pressure, or reward.
[+] [-] k__|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unit91|7 years ago|reply
This statement was bizarrely totalitarian. I actually agree with the fundamental premise that many schools probably start too early. But to say those who take the other side are dangerous people who need to be challenged? Too far.
Ironically, I think this Soviet-esque mentality that "people who disagree with idea X are dangerous" is dangerous!
[+] [-] captainmuon|7 years ago|reply
I think it would make much more sense to change the content of school during those years to reflect the interests of students better. Let them take a break, do something practical, do projects, etc. instead of trying to cram facts into their heads. A lot of stuff I headed to learn when I was 13 I learned easily 5 years later, and vice versa.
[+] [-] butterfi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
Do 3/4 teens fail in life? Do they develop debilitating disorders and such?
I guess I've heard for years we need more sleep yet we don't sleep and we continue living. May be certain things like stress and work are troublesome and such but that seems more like the issue than lack of sleep is.
[+] [-] chillacy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yurishimo|7 years ago|reply
They would be more successful if they got more sleep, so it makes sense to give teens a couple more hours to benefit society as a whole, even if only marginally.
[+] [-] TheCoelacanth|7 years ago|reply
Humans are very resilient and will often have acceptable outcomes even when some aspects of their lifestyle are sub-optimal.
[+] [-] pkelly2505|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speleding|7 years ago|reply
I'm worried that more or less halving the number of times we see each other will have an impact on social cohesion. Of course, one solution would be for everyone to just started an hour later. Or two :-)
[+] [-] vm|7 years ago|reply