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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.'"
Who says kids need to be supervised? I was left without supervision as a young adult on lots of occasions. I still have all 10 fingers and toes.
But then again, my parents gave me repsonsibility and consequences for my actions from a very young age. It's time to stop treating young adults as toddlers, and give them a bit of leeway to be just what they are. Young Adults.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Maybe instead of training them for a life of drudgery, we could let kids be kids.
What is the reality of the "real world"? There are shifts at all hours of the day. Making everything 9-5, 8-4, etcetera doesn't even make sense traffic wise. And how will work-from-home affect things?
Now, I can agree that many kids will eventually work office jobs, but hardly all of them. And shouldn't the school day be structured in the way best times for them? I mean, it is said schools were once structured around the realities of factory life, things like hearing a period bell and shuffling to the next station and what not - but is the reality for most adults factory work anymore either?
The real-world changes. Often times because of a new generation with different ways of thinking.
Schools should be structured to teach effectively. Not to emulate the current workplace in superficial ways for no real good reason.
High school is not supposed to be exactly like the real (employment) world. It is supposed to teach children stuff like mathematics and grammar. If this can be done better by starting lessons an hour later and shifting the more difficult subjects to the afternoon to accomodate (what appears to be) biological facts - then great.
Having teachers, specific schedules en sitting together with 30 of your peers is not exactly like the real world either.
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.
Unless your daughter becomes a nun, she will almost certainly have sex at some point in her life. As a parent, this is beyond your control. Not only that, but you can't control *when* she has sex, either.
The only thing you can control is whether she'll have to worry about hiding her sex life (or lack thereof) from you or not. As her parent, this is up to you, but it's been my experience that girls tend to be less worried about using condoms and choosing good partners when their #1 worry is Mommy And Daddy Finding Out.
Source(s): My own rebellious teenage years.
So what you're saying is that since my parents let me play outdoors (including both downtown and in the woods) from an early age and pretty much didn't supervise me at all from about age 12 I've clearly failed completely at life? Or could it be that the level of supervision needed is dependent on how well parents have raised their children earlier in the childrens' lives? Nah, that sounds crazy, I'd better go quit my job and pick up a good old fashioned heroin addiction so as not to become a problem for your hypothesis...
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Everything you've done with your wife is something your little is likely do at least once. And then some.
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
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
Burying your head in the sand out of fear is the fast track to a teen pregnancy, knock yourself out if you'd rather have a conversation about child rearing than one about condoms when she hits 13!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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.
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You know, not all teens have sex. Some of us even chose not to have sex in our teenage years. You're right that parents cant control when teens have sex, but parents can have a huge impact, good and bad, when it comes to how children think of sex and when they choose to have it.
It's not "turn up when you like", it's just been moved an hour back. It probably also means working for an hour later. I know I find it much easier to get up when there is actual daylight. Over here school and university are usually from autumn to spring with a break over summer, meaning that for a lot of the year it's dark when I get up (and over winter it's even dark again when it's time go home..).
which is totally what she said
I remember when I read Tom Clancy for the first time and saw this kind of fucked-up attitude expressed by Jack Ryan -- horror at the idea of some teenage boy pawing at his daughter. It struck me then, and strikes me still now, as being a clear demonstration of sexism and bizarre Christian attitudes to sex: the daughter as father's property who needs to be "preserved" in her "innocence" and a ridiculous failure to acknowledge young women as sexual beings. You don't have to be a fan of sexual licentiousness to see this kind of attitude as deeply damaged and damaging. I think it's on a continuum with sex-related violence ("jealousy" and "honour" violence). People need to grow up. I can comfortably cope with the idea that both my son and daughter will be sexual beings. All I care about is that, as far as possible, their sexual encounters are positive: enjoyable without negative consequences.
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.
Untrue. You have a choice: Do you want to actually, you know, PARENT your kid, or do you instead decide to panic, and thus leave that task to others. You can behave like a sane human being, and odds is, your kid will be able to talk to you, including about sex and issues surrounding it, such as pregnancy-avoidance. If you're real lucky, they might even consider your opinion borderline relevant.
OR you can run in circles, scream and shout, and thus ensure that your child will -not- ever opt to ask *you* about such issues. Instead, she'll get her information from whatever sources she has, be that the internet, films and movies, or friends.
The parents of my first girlfriend, refrained from panicking. And that was a good thing. It meant the first time she had sex, it was with a boy she knew well and trusted, someone who'd been her boyfriend for months (me), and not, say, in the backseat of some car, intoxicated after a party. It meant she took advantage of the condoms her parents had left in a drawer, and explicitly said they never count and would NOT notice if any went missing. It meant lateron she said "yes" when her mom asked if an appointment with the doctor to get a prescription for the pill would be a good thing. It meant not having to hide, being able to be who we -where-, and overall improved the entire experience for everyone involved.
Panicking is *very* rarely the best choice for a parent. Least of all about something as utterly normal as a teenager developing sexuality.
I call BS. Some of us, as teens, did not have sex. It's highly debatable whether that was a "choice", however.
You're right.
...what, that isn't a happier thought for you?
Your daughter is completely unattractive to everyone and will probably die embittered and alone, having never known the intimate touch of another human being.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Acknowledge that men and women do it the same amount, for the same reasons and like it equally and these daft ideas about a woman's virtue will disappear.
Except, of course, that that's just bullshit.
Look, when it comes to sex, men and women are different, and it isn't somehow bigoted or sexist to say so. It's fucking *evolution*. And the differences in male and female sexual patterns are very well documented, and exist because, in our more primitive primate days, the male and female of the species had different reproductive goals, and therefore different sexual strategies.
Only idiots blinded by a desperate need to be PC would deny this. It's simple biology, and biology doesn't really give a shit about female sexual empowerment.
It's a daft idea called chastity that's being kept alive and well by feminists.
You don't know a lot of feminists, do you?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!