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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 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
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.
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.
Quantum tots
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!
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.
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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.
The whole point is that as they are currently teenagers, they perform better when classes start later. The research does not apply to adults. So, now that they are teenagers, have school later, and when they graduate from college, they will be ready for earlier start times.
10 am sounds really late to me. My school started at 7:30, which meant that the bus picked us up at 7 am. That felt like 4 years of punishment. The reason for the early start time was all the afternoon activities. School got out at 2:30; at that point it was sports (swimming for me) or various clubs, until 4:30 or 5. How on earth can you have any sort of sports when school starts at 10 am?
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Yeah I've noticed American schools start a lot earlier than in many other countries.
9am is the standard school start for both primary (elementary) and high schools here in Australia, as it is in the UK school in TFA. End time is typically 3pm for primary school and 3:30pm for high school (although of course, you may have extra-curricular stuff such as sport or music afterwards).
in superficial ways for no real good reason.
Like teaching young adults that pretty soon they'll be required to conform to a fixed working schedule, same as the rest of us ?
It's not about the actual timing, hell half the students will end up working graveyard shift in a call center or fast food restaurant anyway. It's about teaching some responsibility to the kids, rather than saying "hell, turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
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.
It's OK, once they get a job in the UK, they won't have to do any more thinking.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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Responsibility is taught at home, if the school system is teaching basic forms of responsibility instead of parents then the Nanny State they will inherit will actually be justified. Academic subjects are what school is for with supplemental help at the home.
For all those who are against this schedule change realize that HS students may almost look like adults but they are still developing/growing and are going through a lot of hormonal changes. If it takes school opening up 2 hours later so that we can have communication techs instead of burger flippers I think the schedule shift may be warranted.
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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.
They're not saying "Turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
They're saying "OK, from now on school starts at 10:00am. Make sure you're here then.".
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/
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
It's pretty well known that teenagers have a different biological clock that starts later in the day and ends later in the day as well when compared to adults. This just proves that even more.
In Scotland school classes are from around 9am to 3:40. I had "Physical Education" classes a couple of times a week, each class was a double time slot meaning 80 minutes, but the exercise levels weren't very strenuous.
This cultural difference could explain why everyone here is so fat.
which is totally what she said
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.
Come on, this is the UK we're talking about here. Junior Assistant to the Deputy Permanent Undersecretary for Traffic Cones (North East Region) is about the peak of realistic ambition.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
Sounds like someone woke up too early when commenting. Perhaps try getting up later and reading the summary..
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.
I didn't have a job that started before 10 AM-11 AM until I was 22. Then that company went belly-up, and I didn't get another position that started before 3 PM until I was 26. When I was in college, there was only one class I needed to schedule before 10 AM.
The older I get the more I learn the real world is completely out of whack from what I was told to expect as a kid, and I'd appreciate it if those of you who live in your fantasy "real world" would just shove it. Thank you.
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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.
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?
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It's about teaching some responsibility to the kids, rather than saying "hell, turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
And how, exactly, does moving the school day from 9-3 to 10-4 teach kids to show up when ever they feel like it? They still have to put in 6 hours/d x 5d/wk. They don't get to choose the hours. The kids at this school just get a 6 hour block that is more convenient from a biological perspective. Besides, the best way to teach your kids about punctuality is not school. It is far to easy for perpetually tardy kids to learn how to game the system by kissing up to certain teachers. What they need to do is get a part time job. If they are late or absent too often they will get fired. The loss of money this causes will be far more motivating than detention or being sent to the office where a completely impotent administrator will give them a stern lecture and then send them off to class at worst, and just make them sit in a chair in the waiting room for the rest of the period more often then not (my wife is a middle school/HS teacher).
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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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Actually, I've worked several jobs where working life did run to that timetable, so that people didn't get caught up in the morning rush caused by every job insisting that you should be sitting at your desk by 9am for no particular reason. It led to people not being exhausted by the time they got into the office because they'd been force to stand on the train with their head in somebody's armpit.
Shouldn't the sports and various clubs come SECONDARY to learning?
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.
IIRC, start times for school in my town were 9:30 AM for elementary school, 8:30 AM for Middle School, and 7:30 AM for High School. The reasoning being that the older kids would get out early enough to watch their younger sibilings until the parents got home. There is also the budget issue of need 1/3 as many busses, becuase each bus driver's route took less than an hour and they could thus serve all 3 schools starting with the HS and working down. Fortunatley for me, I lived just down the street from the Elementary and Middle schools I attended, so I didn't have to deal with the bus. OTOH, my parents opted to send me to HS in a different town so we had a 45min drive in the morning to get to school, but after my older brother got his lisence they didn't have to drive us anymore and we tended to get there only 15 min before first bell.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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.
If high school had anything in common with "the real world" aside from being stuck someplace for 8 hours, I might agree with you. In any case, they're going to go immediately from this to college, where they have the freedom to schedule their first class at noon and nothing on Fridays if they work it right, so I think they'll be in for a bit of an adjustment anyway.
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.
Why is this an issue in a global connected world, with different timezones and artificial light? The tendency of "Millenials" would be that they accept more flexibility in work, yet fit it into their lifestyle and are allowed to shift their hours around. (teleworking, catching up hours after 5, some even come in at 7 to be able to leave at 3)...
I walk in at work between 10 and 11am. My clients know that if they book me earlier I'll show up, but am useless all day. It's something I wished wasn't so, but simply "sleeping earlier" just throws me off balance or I'm laying awake in bed.
My schooltime was hell because of this; I dragged myself through classes but was more trying to stay awake as being able to pay attention... Just one hour more in bed would've been a world of difference to me and I would not have the perception of suffering through it and fighting each morning with myself to get up and through the day to stay awake.
For some reason, my biorithm is delayed compared to the "general population"; I get productive and creative in the afternoon and have it peak around midnight to wind down and end up going to sleep around 3-4am. Before noon, I'm waking up and useless, it's when I generally follow up on email but don't get anything significant done.
I do identify with the problems described as delayed sleep phase syndrome
So again, I cope well, I get my work done and get praised. You can't be creative or brilliant in just a certain timeslice, it's about getting your work done. Nobody cares when; you have to wait for Singapore to wake up to start working to get your issues resolved, the US to wake up to go through your communication and get a reply... I have my 8 hours a day (and more) I'm comitted to my clients, but never 9-5.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.
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Not in MY country they won't!
We'll more than happily sacrifice education on the altar of better football players.
7:30 in Switzerland. Talk about crazy...
10am?!? My highschool started at 7! no wonder I never learned anything....
I rarely bothered to turn up to school before 10am anyway....
This is what freelancing is for. I love working for people 5 or more timezones west of me - I'm awake before them.
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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.
Most of them will go to university first, and that means only waking up in time for lectures. Very few of my lectures were at 9am, and most days started around 11am. And, you know, joining the 'real world' and seeking employment is not necessarily something that they need to do - I work freelance and I typically wake up later now that I did at university, and much later than I did at school.
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I used to say the same thing. I was doing programing work. Who cared if I went to bed at 3AM and didn't wake up until 10AM? So long as the work got done, right?
Then the product launched and our customers very much keep an 8AM - 5PM schedule. And if they had a problem at 8AM and couldn't reach anyone for support, they're pissed. In the early days of the company, I was programmer guy/systems guy/tech support guy. I had to learn to adapt rather quick and just know to be up and alert by 8AM even if that meant going to bed before midnight.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Like teaching young adults that pretty soon they'll be required to conform to a fixed working schedule, same as the rest of us ?
Just because you've chosen a lifestyle that forces fixed and rigid working hours doesn't mean that you should feel the need to inflict it on everyone else.
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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.
We used to run this way. Most of the programmers would come in about 11AM, work until 4 or 5 at the office. Usually if we needed to have a meeting or they needed something from one of the other people, it worked out well to have everyone in the same place. Then they'd go home and usually work again from 10PM - 2AM or so from home. Sometimes they'd come back to the office (all had 24 hours access cards). We were able to run like this for about the first year to 18 months until the product started shipping. And the bulk of our clients were small retail outlets that started about 8AM local time and ended about 5PM local time. Typically, we'd field more tech support calls right at 8AM than any other time of the day. So we had to be there because often times it really was a show stopping problem for the client.
We tried setting up an office system that would forward calls to cell phones, but half the time he employees wouldn't pick up. Either the phone was off, in another room, battery dead, or they simply slept through it. In the end we had to make sure at least two people were scheduled at 8AM whether they liked it or now.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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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In other news, "Easier Classes Raise GPAs"
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.
Teenagers are biologically different from adults. By the time they join the adult working world, they'll be biologically adults and better able to handle it.
The strange thing about our society is, there are two camps when it comes to teenagers: One that wants to treat them like forty-year-olds, and another that wants to treat them like four-year-olds. No wonder they're so screwed up.
but real working life doesn't run to that timetable
One of these evenings, us night people are going to kill all the early birds in their sleep, and the world will be a better place where people can rest in peace.
You can't take the sky from me...
How on earth can you have any sort of sports when school starts at 10 am?
How can you learn anything when you're constantly sleep deprived?
So the question is, which is school for: Sports or learning?
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
No, high school is a prison for teenagers. All that stuff with textbooks is window dressing.
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.
I'll say, High School for me used to start at around 7am, and by 10am, lunch had already been over for about 30 minutes.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
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.
When they seek employment they'll no longer be adolescents, which means they won't require as much sleep.
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.
This is what cell phones, mp3 players, and portable video game consoles are for.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
School is about academics, not sport. Your ability to hit a baseball or punt a soccer ball will likely have very little bearing on your future. Your ability to properly cogitate has almost everything to do with your future.
Sport is excellent and has many benefits for the young, and the old, but it is NOT the primary reason for schooling.
You'll just have sports practice in the morning. That would frequently happen with certain sports when I was in high school as one group would use the gym after school and another would use it before school. It wasn't a big deal for the morning group to show up at 6:30 (school started at 8:00), so it should be even less of a problem if school started at 10:00. Shoot, summer workouts when there was no school in session generally started at 7:00-8:00 because it gets so bloody hot outside in the summer here.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
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.
Start early! The baby blaster 2000 will keep those lazy infants from napping the day away so they can be prepared for the world of work that awaits them!
By the time they are ready to enter the workforce beyond McJobs, they will be growing out of the late start phase anyway.
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.
School is primarily about academics, but not exclusively. The ability to appreciate art, get involved in student politics, understand music, question the world, socialize, operate as part of a team, and, yes, engage in sports, if desired, are important parts of being a well rounded human being.
I simply don't believe that it is an either/or proposition. A teenager can't spend all day, every day studying; their bodies are growing and physical activity is necessary. I think that many students without some sort of organized sports activity will be deeply unhappy and consequently their academics will suffer. Their performance will, in fact, be worse for not being able to engage in sports. We had P.E. in high school but only in freshman and sophomore years. It is not enough for many kids, and I know it was not enough for me. I would have gone nuts. As it was, I was able to do sports and do the physical activity (of my choosing) that allowed me to study and do well.
The idea that school is for only one thing is absurd. It's not just sports that pushed to the side when school starts too late; it's every activity that does not occur during prime school hours. My children do the school play, take art classes, do scouts, take dance classes, take piano or violin classes, enter the science fair, and just play. They can only do that because school ends at 3:30. If it ended a 5, they could not, and they would be poorer people because of it; they only do these things because that's what they want to do, each of them to their own activities. My oldest does lighting and stage design, and only got into that because the school play was available after school.
That's not to say that a later school day would not be better for them academically. Just that it needs to be balanced against their other activities, and so rescheduling needs to happen. Having scouts in the morning one day a week, say 8:30 to 10 would work. It's not clear that this works for everything they want to do.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
I can appreciate the justification given for the experiment, but real working life doesn't run to that timetable
It doesn't, really? In my 8 years of work experience, most of them involved coming to work at 10am.
It's not some kind of special favor I had to ask for, either. Normal working hours here are 9-5 or 10-6, whichever you prefer. Same on my two previous jobs.
My girlfriend keeps saying I'm like a teenager. This would seem to agree with her findings.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
That's not exactly 'lunch' then, is it? :)
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.
End time is typically 3pm for primary school and 3:30pm for high school That's because in Australia they need to get out of school in time to get to the pubs before they close!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's been well documented that teen sleep cycles naturally shift towards staying up later and thus waking up later. This isn't a matter of choice, it's a matter of nature, and the "force them to get up anyways" thing is exactly why we have this problem in the first place.
What exactly is your issue with someone going to school from 10a-4p rather than 8a-2p for example? Same amount of school time and now everyone's actually well rested rather than the halls full of sleep-deprived zombies I saw every day at school.
When a majority, and I am not exaggerating, in my first period classes both junior and senior years more than 50% of students had either coffee or an energy drink with them, something is broken as hell.
I popped enough caffeine pills in high school that my heart started doing weird things and I ended up giving up caffeine altogether until college.
Let people sleep their natural cycles and they'll be far more useful when they're awake. Logically following, you set schedules based on the natural sleep cycles of those involved. Since the science says teens naturally go to bed late and wake up late, the logical thing to do is move the school day rather than fight it.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
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
Let me start by saying that I am not opposed to changing start times. I am interested in these pilot schools and how they fare in the long run. A change like this will have an impact the whole community, disturbing its natural cycles. I feel that it is best to know what we are doing before we implement changes on a wider scale.
In my own personal experience, when my children go to bed on time, they wake up ready for the school day. This has become a big issue in my school district, but I have noted that the parents who complain the most, have kids out late at night, or lights on in their bedroom past 10pm.
I am skeptical of results like these in the UK. I want to see long term positive results.
The simple solution is to just make your kids go to bed earlier.
Let's say a kid needs to wake up at 6:00am, and catches the bus at 7:00 am. School starts at 8:00am, and finishes at 3:00pm. Returns home at 4:00pm. So far, so good.
However, most schools assign homework. We'll assume a 1 instruction hour:1 homework hour ratio, and that there are 6 instructional hours in a school day. Homework from 4-7pm, dinner from 7-7:30, and second homework from 7:30-10:30pm. This basically consumes the entire day alone. Homework may sometimes be displaced to a weekend or another day, but I remember most homework being due next-day. If you expect your kid to socialize, get out more, do housrwork, or take up sports, those take up time as well. As such, 10:30pm tends to stick as the earliest time.
A minimal amount of rest is 8 hours. From 10:30, this results in a wakeup time at 6:30am, which compresses the "get ready" phase in the morning. I heard that some the "recommended" ratio is higher, where the recommended is 2 hours homework to 1 hour instruction.
If anything, teenagers are being pushed to staying up late just to complete school.
You make a valid point about too much school work, but that is a whole other conversation. If there is some credible evidence to suggest that a different schedule puts kids into a better rhythm for the day, then fine. But if all we do is time-shift their day, then I see no point to changing anything.
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 ;) )
Schools start early because of sports and after school practice. I visited Austin TX a couple of years ago because I was thinking of moving there and teaching high school. Schools around there seemed to all start later and run later, but they have morning practice also, so again sports.
You'd think that elementary schools could be the ones that began early in the day and middle and high schools later because that seems to be the pattern for children and waking up. But no, sports.
Hey wait I haven't seen anyone lay this one at the feet of evil teachers' unions yet. Get on the ball, people.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
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?
And by "biological facts" you mean that a teen will stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning, regardless of what time they have to be at school, so letting them come in later they get more sleep...as opposed to, I dunno, just going to bed at 9 or 10 like responsible people do and still getting 8-10 hours of sleep and STILL being to school on time, even if it starts at 8 am.
Reminds me of the old Franklin planner seminar video, wherein the instructor has all his five children (including two teens) get up at 5am so they can do their daily planning together. A question from the audience asks how in the world he gets his teens up at 5am, to which he calmly replies that he puts them to bed at 8pm. More incredulous, the audience member asks him how he gets his teens to go to bed at 8pm. With a smile he replies, "I get them up at 5."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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?!