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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?
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.
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
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
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.
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
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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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/
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 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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As a former baystater, I can attest to the idiocy that the puritan legacy has played on that state. However, I don't see that this has anything to do with the puritans. AFAIK, the current schedule for schools was worked out based on what was cheapest for communities to pay for. Students start at approximately 9:30, 8:30 or 7:30 depending on their grade level (Elementary, Middle, or High School) so that older children will get out befor the younger, thus providing supervision until the parents get out of work, and so that the school only needs to buy enough busses for 1/3 of the total student population in the town.
I think a big part of the problems I've seen with the Massachusetts education system is the use of new "Progressive Education" techniques pioneered in the 60's, shown to be largely counter productive by the late 70's, but still en vogue in the late 90's (when I graduated HS). They care far too much about self esteem and student's feelings, and far to little for making the students perform. I believe that I did well in spite of many of my teachers instead of because of their efforts. Only a handful of my teachers actually challenged me, and that's because they didn't accept excuses or care too much about how a 'C' or a 'D' made me feel. Those rare grades made me feel bad, but they also motivated me to improve my performance (and not because I was getting paid for A's as many of my peers were).
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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.
In my teen and college years I would get up around 14-15 (that's 2-3 PM for you americans) on weekends and it took a lot of effort to go from my teenage 9-10:30 wakeup to getting up at 7 for some lectures in college, the only reason I pulled that off was because unlike HS it was actually subjects I wanted to learn about instead of random classes that someone else had decided I needed to take and which were often watered down to the point where there was little to nothing interesting left, as an example our HS biology class seemed to spend more time learning what the leaves of different trees looked like than anything useful (come on, I don't need to spend several hours in early-morning classes to learn how to identify birch trees, they're all over the place).
I don't normally nit-pick spelling and grammar, but what I quoted above from your post is one sentence. Please be kind to your readers and add proper punctuation! I actually tried to read that all in one breath. It didn't end well. ;-)
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