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Later School Start For Teenagers Brings Drop In Absenteeism
krou writes "Monkseaton High School in North Tyneside, UK, began an experiment in October that saw its 800 pupils ranging in age from 13-19 attend school an hour later than normal, at 10am. Early results indicate that 'general absence has dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.' Head teacher Paul Kelley supported the idea because he believed that 'it was now medically established that it was better for teenagers to start their school day later in terms of their mental and physical health and how they learn better in the afternoon', and he now claims that the children are becoming 'happier better educated teenagers' as a result of the experiment. The experiment is being overseen by Oxford neuroscience professor Russell Foster. 'He performed memory tests on pupils at the school which suggested the more difficult lessons should take place in the afternoon. He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years — meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do.'"
Teens starting school later? Who's going to supervise the teen until they get to school? Won't somebody think of the parents?
I would say the same should be applied to all the other places - like, jobs we adults do.
I never used to kick into gear until about 11 am as a schoolkid. Even at university this didn't happen. I was just never a morning person.
Now that I'm a working stiff, I get up at 6am every morning, but *believe* me, I'd prefer to mosey on in to work at 10 am and work later.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I can appreciate the justification given for the experiment, but real working life doesn't run to that timetable, so unless there's a major shift in that respect, a lot of young adults are going to be in for a bit of a shock when they join the real world and seek employment.
AT&ROFLMAO
Sure son, now go brush your teeth and go to bed. Else you won't be awake and fresh tomorrow when school starts.
I might have actually enjoyed school. Ok maybe not. But I sure would have enjoyed sleeping in an addition hour. The only problem with this here in the US is when you take into account that you have to get up 2 or 3 hours before school starts to wake up, showered, eat, and go to the bus stop and wait forever for the bus to show up then the hour plus ON the bus you still are having to get up WAY too early. And does that mean instead of getting out of school at 3:15 you don't get out until 4:15 now? So you are getting back on the bus and riding it back home for another hour and not getting home until 5:15 or later? That part would kind of suck.
Monitoring students changes the outcome?
He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years — meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do
I believe they start to sleep very late and thus need to wake up late, otherwise memory and concentration fail.
I've noticed such a shift with myself, when I started to go bed around midnight or 2am. Suddenly I was much less efficient at work in the morning but rather good around 5pm. No biological change. Just stupid habits.
At Wellington High School, they have been starting the seniors about an hour later for the last few years. It seems to work well, and the students are happier for it.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
People perform better when they have had enough rest!?!?!
No shit!
Going to school at 9am? Dear lord, lucky kids. Schools here start at 7:45-8:00am...
Here in Mass my kids have to be on the school bus at 6:40am, so classes start at around
7:25. This is so they can use the same buses to make a second round later and pick up
the elementary school kids.
Everyone here is constantly sleep deprived, and I know their learning suffers for it.
If 10am is the new 9am then 1am is the new midnight. Give them some time to adapt and they'll still be late for school
maybe then a solution is full curriculum night/afternoon highSchools/universities to be made available, adjusting employee(teacher) hours and positions based on the times The Students decide are best for them to learn at. now that im actually thinking about it, after elementary (grd 1-8 - no middle school around here) there isnt much reason to start school at the stroke of 9. perhaps for students that need rides from parents there's reason. for many students at that age though, the need for supervision after parents leave for work isnt there. and then the need for school to start at a time that corresponds with the parents work is no longer there and high school start times become unjustifiably inconvenient... for students at least. id expect "alternative" secondary schools to experiment with this first before anything changes... it might even stay in the alternative area in the end as i expect a lot of people(certainly not the students) wont cater to the change. it's 630 and i have to leave now for class at 9... guhh
I don't understand. Time is that totally arbitrary number we put out, and change twice yearly, as arbitrarily. Basically, make yoiur clocks run 1 hour early. You'll feel soooo much better, if you believe what the say.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I bet this is just the Hawthorne Effect. I bet that if they had another school and told them that they were going to start an hour earlier, as they believed that this would allow pupils to get the work done and have more free time in the evenings, this school would also have shown an improvement.
It's really too bad the Mayflower didn't go down with all hands instead of inflicting the Puritans on what became the United States.
The sleep phase shift at puberty, and back again at about 20, is well documented. Simple application of intelligence would then indicate that school start, relative to childhood, should be adjust during those years to maximize students' potential to learn.
In the USofA, however, the Puritan cultural and genetic infestation will cause the evidence to be simply dismissed, to the detriment of our childrens' education, bacause they "should just learn to adapt".
Everyone is different. You cannot paint all people with such a broad brush. There are always morning people. When I was in High School, I was up at 4AM every day (and still am) to do my homework and/or study for tests.
For me, mornings were for learning, and afternoons were for doing. My brain has always worked that way. A late school day would have been horrible for me.
Isn't afternoon relative? Won't teenagers just stay up an hour later until eventually they have the same problems with 10 am as they do with 9 am now?
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
I wonder if some teenager's parents will sue for a later start to the school day, due to the health risks to adolescents of starting early.
After all, if "think of the children" can be used to justify all kinds of things, including taking kids away from parents, surely school systems can be compelled to shift their work day a few hours later.
The circadian cycle is a PLL. It does not cause you to fall a sleep at a particular time, but it drives you towards one, based on a feedback loop, with input from light exposure, notably. It might be just bad habits .. or it might be that your circadian clock is out of phase.
Yeah, the school bus really wastes time-out-of-your-life, especially if you're one of the first stops. It doesn't even really save that much on fuel, because of the way the routes are planned, the many stops and acceleration, and the sheer bulk of the thing. We really need a better option for places where walking doesn't work for whatever reason.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Thomas Edison has a lot to answer for (at least for adult sleep patterns).
Electric lighting may have given massive boosts to human productivity. However, if it wasn't for electric light, we would all be going to bed much sooner (as you can't do any real work by candlelight), and then waking up in the morning with the natural daylight. Anyone who has spent time wild camping has experienced this..... and also knows how much more refreshed they feel waking up to the wavelengths inherent to natural light.
Of course, those that live above/below certain latitudes might argue differently when winter comes along and there is no daylight in which to do any work. You can only spend so much time in bed
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Here's a nice BBC documentary called "The secret life of your bodyclock" about this effect. Including a piece very similar to this specific case. It can be viewed @ http://www.documentary-log.com/d379-secret-life-of-your-body-clock/
Does anybody else think that 9am was already late enough? I mean, come on! I started school at 7:45! I'd be kind of pissed if they pushed school back so far that I was in class until 5pm...
In junior high as well as high school my classes started at 7:20 am.. Since I lived about 12 miles from my school I got up at 5 am. and cooked my breakfast and drove to school. Because I worked until at least 9 Pm after school and at times until midnight by the time I studied and did my homework there were many nights I did not sleep at all.
So if the teens don't want to push their limits we should not wait for them to drop out. Throw them out and save everyone the bother. Education is no different than business, war or sports. If you want to survive you had best be willing to hump it.
These kids need to get over it. I'm only 6 years removed from high school now, but back then 1st period started at 7:10am and I'm pretty sure that hasn't changed since I graduated. And TFA is talking about 10am? Wow.
Guess what? If you move the start time back an hour or two, the kids will just start to take up an hour or two later. Nothing will change. I didn't RTFA, but I can almost guarantee that if they left this "start later" system in place long enough, they'd see absenteeism rise back to 'normal' levels anyways.
What really drives things (no pun intended) around here are the school buses.
First they go around and pick up and deliver the High and Middle schoolers ,
then the Elementary school kids.
Suggesting two sets of buses or (gasp!) doing the elementary kids first would
be dismissed as lunacy.
I want to know how the researchers are guarding against the John Henry effect. That is, the subjects exceeding normal expectations because of the study.
It's too early to read the article. Can someone summarize for me?
(It's a joke. It's a joke. But, it is too early... I wish I was still asleep but I have to get up for work... I'd love to have flex hours and be able to start later. I'm pretty sure I'd be happier at my job if I could. I think this sort of approach to a school is brilliant and I applaud them for being bold enough to be willing to give it a try.)
I don't know... my experience has been that it's all a feedback loop. Sure, sleeping one hour later is going to make you happier for a month or a trimester or a year, but then you just become used to going to bed one hour later, and the cycle repeats. Now instead of going to bed at 10 PM and maybe pushing it to 11 PM now and then, the normal go to bed hour becomes 11 PM and you start pushing towards midnight on those days when you think "nah, one less hour of sleep won't kill me." Except eventually it accumulates and now you'd be happy to have one _more_ hour.
I remember reading about a study waay back, where some people were put in a house with no windows and no time to tell the time. It turned out that the natural cycle for humans is 26 hour days. Makes sense from a design stand point too. It's easier to have a margin of error as a longer cycle and reset it each day, than to try to prolong one which due to genetic variations is too short for a day. We're pretty much by design prone to shift forward over time, in the absence of that forcing it to reset at the same time. So basically you shifted one hour forward, now what? You've just created the setup to want to shift one more hour later. Then what?
Plus, think of it this way. The best hour they wake up is based on when they go to sleep, which in turn depends on other factors like what's on TV or whether their guild mates are still in a WoW raid or just if some friend is still awake and reachable by phone. Sure, if we could shift just one group of kids one hour forwards while all those factors stay the same, yeah, it should work. But if we actually shifted every single teenager an hour forward, then TV programs which have them as a target audience would start shifting one hour forward too. Because that's the nature of the free market. You don't pack your wares and leave while it's still prime time for your customers. Their friends too have been shifted one hour forward, and can plan those raids to end one hour later. Your friends are available on the phone one hour later. Etc.
The feedback loop is pretty much built in.
All those factors anchoring the bed time just shifted forward too. Soon we're back to square one: kids who hadn't had enough sleep, being barely fit to go to school at the new starting time. Soon you'll need another hour shift to get the same results as in TFA. And in a few months another. What then? Eventually end up with school shifted forward all the way to starting at 1 AM? Then what?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Man, back in the good old days, when kids were ten, they went into the mills and the mines. Or on the ships. They were the ones that lit the fuses and ran because they were the smallest. They helped bring back lunch and stuff and they learned how to grow up to be real and hardy men. Now look at us.
Repeal child labor laws before this present moral degradation is too late! I'm building a toy coal mine for my four year old in my backyard! We're going to play Black Lung and Cave In.
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Most schools are setup so you end up with about 1.5 extra semesters worth of credits by the time you graduate, in case you screw anything up. By your junior year a lot of kids at my old high school were taking teacher assistant and study period 0-credit classes, usually scheduled for the first two periods of school, with a sign in/attendance sheet that had to be turned in to the office by the end of the day on friday of each week - i.e. was not policed closely unless you started robbing gas stations during school hours. This generally meant you could skip the first two hours of the day and arrive at school to get in one or two classes before lunch, and then cruise through the rest of the afternoon.
On the flip side we also had "zero hour" which started an hour before 1st period, allowing those genetic freaks who woke up early to get their school day done with by 1:30. I wish I had known more about these programs going through school.
moox. for a new generation.
And that's through 5 feet of snow while being chased by wolves.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
No mystery here.
I just need to sync back to daylight and stop being addicted to home cinema and some forums.
I think those students experiment the same shift because of their late surfing/blogging/irc/texting and parties.
I graduated 2nd in my class, and went on to one of the top 10 engineering schools in the country. And I got up every morning on time. The trick? Eat breakfast - and I don't mean a coffee or a Snickers. Parents, feed your damn kids a real meal.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Replace the school bus system with an expanded mass transit system and everyone will be a lot better off.
10am?!? My highschool started at 7! no wonder I never learned anything....
Maybe some kind of smaller version of the bus. A personal version, capable of carrying maybe four or five people, and inexpensive enough that you can put the burden of buying and maintaining it onto the parents. That could work. If only I could think of a suitable analogy...
I rarely bothered to turn up to school before 10am anyway....
It's amazing to me how every now and then, someone too clueless to just look at what's been done before redoes this same study and comes to the same conclusion. Teenagers have a shifted sleep schedule. Their internal clocks want to put them to sleep later but they need the same amount of sleep. So... if you put them in school a little later in the day, they handle it better, because they get more sleep.
The simple solution is to just make your kids go to bed earlier. The same irresponsible parents that let their high schoolers stay up too late will likely let them stay up even later after the school schedule is adjusted. The study has some merit, but I doubt that the trends for this school will hold. I suspect the drop in absenteeism is only temporary, and that the rate will go back up in a few short years.
Uh, no. There are well documented physical shifts in teenagers whereby their bodies' sleep cycles shift forward when they hit their teens and back (to normal adult sleep cycles) when they hit their 20's. Any normal teenager will not be able to sleep up until 11 or something like that. They are physically incapable of.
I agree that many parents don't know how to raise their teen kids, but here you are in the wrong. Do yourself a favor and read a bit about human physical development ;)
This doesn't work in real life for a few reasons: 1. Childcare. Older siblings often watch younger siblings after school until the parents come home from work. That's why older kids start first. So they are home when the elementary schools let out. From what teachers told us in High School, it's often the law that it's done that way during early closings (weather events). By shifting the schedule, you now make families shift that child care burden and cost. 2. Reduces the consecutive block of hours that a teenager can work. This is important for those who need to contribute to pay the bills, or cover their education (college) in the future. Yea they get more morning time, but it's hard to work 2 hours, go to school, then back to work 2 hours. What business wants to accommodate that work schedule? Overall, it's fine for the wealthy, but it really punishes poor students and their families.
The school bus is a brand of semi-necessary evil. The system was forced to provide an option so that a parent who couldn't take their kids to school didn't wreck the kids' education.
The savings are not about fuel, they're about *saving parental time/money*. Say 15 kids on a route * 20 min parental time saved each way *2 times per day - 600 min aka 10 hours total parental time saved/day. Because of staggered distances, parent returns home, etc etc, prob as high as 15 Parental hours per day per route.
At 12 bus routes per day * # days/year, that adds up!
You're right about the first kid on the stop getting wrecked. And I assumed a "rich" system with only 15 stops per route! When a school struggles they cut bus routes, and some systems have as many as 30 stops on a route.
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A teacher at an American high school from 2004 to 2007, I can testify that the fact the school day started at 0730 [or 0830 if a student only had six periods per day] was only part of the reason students skipped so damn much. Other problems were:
- The student parking lot was subject to flooding. Forecasts of rain would have students skipping over not having a parking space close enough to the school.
- Students would drive off campus to buy lunch, and unable to make it back in time, would skip all their afternoon classes.
- Even though four absences in a quarter result in an 'F' for the quarter, it was well known that the principal would make all those absences go away at the end of the year, mainly to boost the graduation rate and to keep "My child never skips!" parents at bay. Every year, about 1/4 of the senior class wouldn't meet the graduation requirements due to attendance failures, and the principal would make all those absences go away. The principal was himself a 1982 alum, football player, and all-around mediocre student, so he sympathizes.
In other news, "Easier Classes Raise GPAs"
Within the US, why are we even bothering to send them to school anymore? It's not like one has to work anymore to subsist. If the majority keeps voting socialist, I'm sure our government would be more than happy to cover their cost of living.
I was a teenager just a few years ago. We started school at 7.30. I can tell you from personal experiance that i didn't learn anything until the main break at 10am. I basilcy slept until than. After 10am i was wide awake. Ask any teenager and they will agree. There have been a lot of studys and everybodys personal experianca that your clock changes when your a teenager, now it's time to start making adjustments to fit them, not force them into something just because the adults this it sould be like that.
Except for the fact that syndrome means a symptom or group of behaviours, not a cause or explanation. Just because you can group a set of behaviours and call it a syndrome, it doesn't mean you have an objective disease, much less something where you can just throw your hands up and pretend there's nothing you can possibly do about it.
To put it otherwise, you could equally call laziness a syndrome. You could call procrastination a syndrome. You could call smoking pot and then getting the munchies a syndrome. (They do happen together, right?) And yes you could call going to sleep later until some other factor puts an upper limit on it a syndrome.
Sometimes a syndrome is indicative of an objective disease. E.g., AIDS is the syndrome for HIV infection. But it's not the same thing as the disease itself. (And that distinction, or rather failure to understand it, caused a whole idiotic conspiracy theory in the case of AIDS.)
And sometimes it's just a fancy name.
You can even take a "condition" basically boiling down to "oh, shit, now I'll have my husband at home all the time" and call it the Retired husband syndrome. Literally, Japanese women seem to get stressed for cultural reasons as their husbands approach retirement. So they called it a syndrome. It doesn't mean there's an actual biological condition that develops in that woman. It's just a fancy name for a cultural cause of stress.
So basically: just because you can put a medical sounding name on going to sleep late doesn't necessarily make it an objective medical condition.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Walking? The school systems here bus kids to the school that's ONE BLOCK away. And they stop at every single driveway on a block where a kid lives.
Because... you know... "Why don't you have a seat over there..."
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
European schools start at 9am?
Lucky devils, when I graduated high school about 6 years ago, we had to be IN CLASS at 7:30am. It's pretty sad when kids need to leave for school before parents need to leave for work. But alas, that's the American education system.
Well, my school district replaced the buses with having all the parents drive their kids to school. It is worse for the environment, costs more money per student, is more dangerous per student, but since all of the cost and legal liability is now on the parent, it works out better for the school.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
'it was now medically established that it was better for teenagers to start their school day later in terms of their mental and physical health and how they learn better in the afternoon'
ITYM 'socially' not 'medically'. Teenagers are not biologically predisposed to staying up late and getting up late, otherwise they would have been doing this in the 1800s. We don't evolve fast enough to have gone from creatures that go to sleep and rise with the sun to creatures who go to sleep at 1 and wake up at noon and then miraculously at the age of 22 suddenly change to creatures that go to bed at reasonable hours and wake up at reasonable hours. It is all just social custom.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
When I was in high school, I wondered aloud a couple times why school didn't start a little later. The answer I always got was that high school kids needed to get out of school at 2:30 so they could go to their jobs to earn money to pay for their cars which helped them get to school in time for their first classes at 7.
Um, yeah.
This is what cell phones, mp3 players, and portable video game consoles are for.
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The science behind this involves something called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome which basically means a person's "body clock" is "late" by a few hours... it's something that occurs with many teenagers and usually sorts itself out, but not always. (I didn't RTFA so I dunno if it mentions this or not.)
I was diagnosed as potentially having this condition in my late 20s by a sleep therapist. Never had a full evalulation on it specifically because treatment of the psychological and physical issues greatly reduced my problems. However, I suspect I had it and indeed probably still do (5 years later), because I've always been very prone to being a night owl. Though I now get up at 6am for work (something once impossible) I can still easily stay up past midnight, and the odd time I do manage to get to bed early enough for 7-8 hours sleep I'm still super tired at 6am. On weekends if I don't set an alarm I will sleep past 10am just about every time.
Most of my best coding has been done after midnight... always like to joke at work that I'd be at least twice as productive if they let me work 8pm-4am. Of course I never actually would do that, that schedule would suck on many other levels.
Actually IMHO those light cues are exactly why we have a problem nowadays. We're a species which, true, evolved in the context of such periodic cues and to rely on them. But it's become trivial to mess with those. We're nowadays one flick of the switch away from having (a reasonable approximation of) daylight until 6 am, and enough mental stimulation to help stay awake that some ancestor sleeping in a cave wouldn't have. (Heck, when my parents didn't let me stay at the computer all night, I'd just read a book until 7 AM.) And we're one pull of the cord on the blinds away from having night until 14 pm.
As far as those external hints are concerned, it's only up to you whether you want to rely on them or fake any kind of artificial day/night cycle that you wish.
So basically we're just back to where we started. If you let people turn off the light one hour later, and open their blinds one hour later to send them to school, well, you just moved those light hints by one hour. Whatever problem there was with adapting to the old cycle, now it just moved one hour forward. It might still work if other factors still anchor their bed time, but if you move everyone one hour forward, those disappear too.
Basically think about moving one timezone to the left or right. Does it ever solve anything?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Where I live, school kids use the regular Transperth bus/train system to get to school. Some schools (especially the larger private schools that have students comming from all over the city) have extra School Special buses that run various routes (depending on demand and how many students live where). All the buses used for these are the same route service buses used everywhere else on the system.
I see school kids on the bus and train all the time.
I dont understand why the Americans (in cities with existing public transport anyway) need special "school buses" and why they need all those regulations governing what a "school bus" is legally required to carry/have/look like/etc.
Man that was a good one! Public transit in American cities! You're a wily one. To be a bit more serious, except for the middle of big metropolitan areas there's not a lot of really good public transit in many cities in the US. The city centers tend to be all commercially zoned with everyone living further out from the center. If there is any public transit it usually only goes from the outskirts of town to the center of town. Even in the middle of cities houses are build in subdivided tracts with a lot of small curving streets that are not appropriate for buses and in many cases can't handle larger vehicles. In order to get to a bus stop from the middle of one of these tracts you need to walk a ways to one of the artery roads and hope there's a bus stop around. It's a very everyone-owns-a-car design of housing.
Housing tracts built in this manner often have schools between different tracts so public buses that only travel on arterial roads aren't useful for a majority of students. School buses are lighter weight than public buses and tend to ride higher to be able to handle turns and curves better. Running these extremely limited routes isn't going to be profitable for the public transit agency so the school districts usually operate the buses. They're the only large vehicles that can really get around the curvy streets of housing tracts and carry a lot of people.
People that live in cities that have good public transit use it to get their kids to school but a large percentage of people don't really live where public transit is workable and so you have school buses.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
> We really need a better option for places where walking doesn't work for whatever reason.
Ever heard of a thing called bicycle? I used to get to school for 9 years, 5 km distance. Before that I walked 2km to primary school for 4 years.
As did about all my friends. IIRC hose who lived in more than 5 km distance had the option to use public transport and did so.
All of us survived.
I do understand that this is no option in the really rural areas, but.
.... and not a child, I would expect for you to be able to exist without supervision. How much of a mama's boy were you that you needed supervision as an adult? If anything, you should be crowing that you were trusted as a TEEN, not into your ADULT years. "Look at me, I'm 20 years old, and I'm gonna be ALL BY MYSELF!"
Is this what the USA has come to, where people need to supervised into their adult years? No wonder this country is losing to everyone, we are raising a country of 22 y/o children.
In college, we had an advanced Calculus class with a real hard-ass teacher that some asshole schedule at 7am... needless to say, this was not popular with the students. Most of us barely made it through.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Send your teen to a timezone 3 hours west of you to attend highschool.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I know this is against /. 's unwritten rules, but here are actual results of previous tries:
http://www.cehd.umn.edu/research/highlights/Sleep/ and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080609071202.htm and http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/133246.php
Ok, now back to fantasies about sex-crazed teens left unattended but apparently with the means to get to their FWB's house at 7 AM...
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I cant believe that these kids were going in so late to begin with. 9 a.m. for a teenager should be easy as heck, but 10 well that sounds like some lazy rubbish across the pond. I had to go in at 7:15, which meant that I was getting up around 6, and they are still doing it to this day. It is a character builder and it fits with the rest of the work forces expectations for the real world. Show me a job that starts at 10 in the morning and ill quit my job right now.
I'm the same way, except as a grad student I am in a position where I really can do all my work at night.
The only times I actually get any work done are when my schedule works out such that I am able to do work between 11PM and 7AM (approximately). If I need to do something during business hours, I just stay up a little longer, go and do it, and then come home and go to sleep. I wake up around 6 or 7PM, eat a combination breakfast/dinner, waste a little time doing whatever, then get to work fully awake and relaxed and with few distractions.
Currently, however, I've switched into an almost "normal" schedule... falling asleep exhausted around 9 or 10 PM and getting up around 6 or earlier. If we're throwing syndromes around, it's clear to me I have the problems described by Non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome. It's not always gradual, though, pushing forward over days and weeks... sometimes it can be suddenly jolted forward several hours (which is what happened to me recently).
The coolest part, though, is that I had a great way to test this: while I was in a "reverse" phase (asleep during the day and awake overnight) I went to Thailand for a month, which was a 13-hour difference in timezones (currently it's 14 hours but was 13 hours at the time due to DST). That means that I should have had no jet lag and should have been able to keep a "normal" schedule while there. Indeed, I had no jet lag... by keeping with the same schedule I had been keeping at home, I woke up in the morning for the first few days... but then it started slipping. I didn't get quite to the point of a reverse schedule again because I had things to do during the day while there, but it was tough and I was usually tired during the day.
On the one hand, having these kinds of problems with sleep schedules is a good thing - I'm able to fairly easily alter my schedule at short notice if I need to for whatever reason, and I can stay up for a day or two if necessary with little ill effect. On the other hand, it really hurts my ability to interact with people in regular society. As a grad student no one cares about that's fine, but I know I'm going to have huge problems if/when I get a real job (sticking with academia would seem to be a partial solution, but I don't want to do that for other reasons ;) )
Just use a series of tubes.
My entire high school started at 7:30 a.m. every morning!
These kids had it better than most already.
Or teens could, you know, go to sleep one hour earlier?
Well duh. I don't know why our culture is so obsessed with doing everything so early in the morning. Well, actually I do, it's because everyone else woke up to late to vote on it.
or else!
Oh, it's far too late for em. I used to attend schools as far away as 13km (carpooled on that one). When I was only 2km away, I did walk home, at least, although car-pooling was a good way to get extra half-hour of sleep in the morning and not have to arrive sweaty from the 12kg of books that had to be transported.*
*frankly, I think that you improve options significantly by just issuing two sets of books to every student.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The bus I got to and from school was about 50% children at certain times of day (say, four consecutive buses in the morning and afternoon). The train I used to get to work had a similar number of kids twice a day. In both cases the children can help keep a marginally-profitable service running -- directly from fares, or indirectly through subsidy.
It also more flexible for the children. They can stay at school for a club and still get a bus back, or miss the bus in the morning and simply get the next one.
It does mean all the grannies on the buses get pissed off when 30 excited/bored/playful teenagers pile on.
It is worse for the environment, costs more money per student
These ideas are "obvious," but I haven't seen anything that actually proves or shows or even calculates that this would or ought to be the case.
Remember the old saw about flies and honey?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!