I used to have lots of problems getting up early and always championed later times. Growing up through my twenties, it was great seeing finally seeing more and more evidence for a later school start and I was hopeful for future teens.
But it wasn't until my first kid that I finally understood that school doesn't start this early because it's good for the learning experience.
It starts this early so parents can get their kids to school and start working afterwards, without getting fired.
Schools can still help with this by trying to schedule the core academic stuff later in the the day and the less mentally intense stuff like PE earlier in the morning.
My kids' elementary school actually does this. They tell parents "if your child has a doctor's appointment or needs to be out for a portion of the day, schedule it at the beginning or end of the day to make sure they don't miss anything important."
The problem with that is rotating schedules is more economically efficient than loading all the class-types onto one time of the day. This would mean you need more PE teachers in the morning, more math teachers in the mid-day. There's a reason schools have multiple periods of each course, and that those periods rotate day-to-day.
One interesting follow-up study could be to compare night-owls/morning-larks in rotating schedule schools vs schools with fixed schedules. We could then see do night-owls do significantly worse in the classes they only take in the morning, vs night-owls who take classes rotating throughout diff periods of the day?
At the root of it, they define "core" as Math and English with the goal to centralize those two in the middle of the day as much as possible.
Physical Education, Art, Spanish, Music, History, Science, etc are scheduled around those accordingly.
The main reasoning is simply that math and English are the two subjects that build upon each other the most from grade level to grade level and because of that, they are considered the "core".
It's not about which subjects build on each other. These two are the subjects that have mandated federal testing in the US [1]. Low test scores in reading and math have consequences for schools and their leaders, so they get the priority slots.
hm, that's very debatable. alot would contend history and science are core but others aren't. I've heard many complain that they never use math in the real world. I think math is core but the problem is its very opinion based. I don't see how other subjects don't build on each other.
Physics is applied Maths, of course they build on each other. History and historical knowledge builds on other things, geography most obviously, but primarily on itself. It’s easier to learn and remember history if you already know some. But having studied history it’s quite obvious that at an undergraduate level it builds on itself much, much less than something like Math or Physics. The degree to which upper level courses depend on lower level courses is minimal.
Different fields differ in how much they are built on mental models and how much they’re just a grab bag of connected facts you have to know and learn. Biology has more disconnected you just need to know it stuff than Chemistry.
I think you're reading a lot more into my comment than what's there. I'm not claiming that math classes have a completely linear dependency chain, nor am I saying that no other subjects have classes with meaningful dependencies, and I'm especially not claiming anything about graduate level course work in any subject.
Organic chemistry is not an elementary school course. Science taught in grade school usually has few inter-dependencies because it aims to cover a very broad range of topics at a very basic level. Ditto history.
Math is like going to the gym but for your brain. I consider it the most expensive sport that you can play. to do math You may never need anything you learn in math but I know it changes my problem solving abilities for the better. The more Math I know the more creative I can be when solving problems.
I agree with you 100% that the average person doesn't need math throughout their lives. We need to stress teaching statistics though in schooling (high school especialy) because that is something that manipulates people constantly .
I suspect it depends on the age of the students. In grade school when kids are learning to read and do addition, it's hard to imagine anything more core than that and science/history taught at that age is more about getting kids exposed to those concepts rather than actual learning. But once kids get to secondary school and English transitions to British Lit, American Lit and other variations on "read books and write an essays", the actual class time seems much less important than science classes where high school students actually learn the core tenets of Bio, Chem and Physics.
the importance of the ability to calculate and communicate are debatable only by people in total denial about how pervasive both are in our society. should those people really have any say in the curriculum of our children's future?
hm, that isn't what i said. You were ranking them relative to eachother and i said people might disagree on the relative rankings. I said that "people may disagree that math and english are more important than history and science". You responded as if i said "Math and english aren't important". Those are two completely different arguments.
yeah. they start and run successful small businesses across the country. making millions of dollars. Outside of engineering and accounting, very few professions need math.
The actual problem began when humans invented candles and lightbulbs and started staying up past 8pm, and going to bed at inconsistent hours, therefore waking up tired the next mornings.
Our optimal sleeping time is based on the rotation of earth around the sun. We have removed our brain's natural sleep trigger (lack of light) so our sleep habits have been getting out of whack for the last couple of hundred years.
What is really interesting is that human's natural sleep cycle is not to sleep continuously for 8 hours. Our natural sleep cycle is to go to bed when it gets dark and then to wake up for a few hours in the middle of the night and get up and do things (apparently this is also the time when most sex happened since other family members in the same room were still asleep) and then go back to sleep and get back up at dawn.
I live at 60 degrees Northern latitude, and I sleep a lot more in the winter. And it's really difficult in the summer too, because it never gets dark and you need to go to bed to get up in the morning.
For some reason it's not difficult for me to sleep past sunrise, but very hard to go to bed before sunset or wake before sunrise. And some people are the opposite.
This just applies to adults. Children and teenagers naturally sleep longer than adults and probably slept throughout the night. Plus, apparently people didn't all get up at the same time during the night. Some would be up from midnight-2am, others from 2am-4am, etc.
For the most part i agree, but how about summer times in the northern regions in US or the world when sun doesnt set until beyond 9pm or say Norway where it can be until midnight or more than 60 days in some areas?
In most of the US, during elementary school, you generally have 1 teacher throughout the day that teaches all subjects, and you only leave to go to PE, art, or music once per day.
Since the whole getting kids to school early so that someone can watch them while the parents work only really only applies to younger students, this isn't a problem.
> Since the whole getting kids to school early so that someone can watch them while the parents work only really only applies to younger students, this isn't a problem.
I'd guess that a significant fraction of teenagers would have difficulty waking up and getting to school on time if they didn't have a parent around to wake them up, feed them breakfast, push them out the door, etc. Not all teens are self-motivated and independent enough to do this on their own every single day.
> There's a reason schools have multiple periods of each course, and that those periods rotate day-to-day
Could you elaborate on this? What is the reason? Saying it's "more economically efficient" than grouping class types is something many of my teachers would disagree with, as they have lives they would love to get to outside of school (e.g. if a PE teacher gets out early in the morning, they can go to their second job or see their own kids) and complain about having to stay at school because there isn't enough time between similar classes that are spread across different times of day.
Because a single PE teacher can manage five rotating classes of twenty kids throughout the day. If kids didn't rotate periods, then all 100 kids would take PE at the same time. That would require extra PE teachers, because one teacher cannot manage 100 kids. Multiply this effect by every different area (music teachers, art teachers, etc.) and you have to hire a bunch of extra teachers which is a waste of money. Plus, those teachers would only be busy for part of the day, so their wasting a lot of their time.
These specialized teachers are non-existent in many schools. You may have a PE teacher, but they may or may not already be full time. Art teacher? LOL
Many school districts around the country are far too broken to worry about start times. The republicans have done a very good job of starving education for money over the last 20 years, and rampant corruption within the teachers unions and school/district administrations doesn’t help the situation.
Everyone keeps saying PE but imagine 1 math teacher trying to teach 150 kids at once. Not effective with traditional teaching. We already struggle with overly large class sizes making it harder to teach.
I got to go to a fancy school where there were like 12 kids in the class. It was amazing, I learned so much during my time there. Conversely, I went to some pretty shoddy city schools as well and the teacher could barely get the students to just be quiet.
I will say in yet another school (I moved A LOT) for my final semester of high school I went to an alternative school where you did all your coursework on the computers. You could work as fast or as slow as you wanted. It didn't take very many teachers to run that at all. The computer took care of most of it, including hints and letting you rewatch how to solve the problem. I loved this-- school was always kind of boring and I was always one of the first to finish and just end up reading a book...but I was able to finish up my whole class extremely quickly (I think a month or so, it's been a few years).
At least where I went to school, teachers generally had full schedules with maybe one period empty for prep. If they are teaching multiple sections of the same class, it isn't feasible to lump all classes of a certain kind into one part of the day. The same person can't teach multiple classes at once.
Ah, that is a bummer. My high school allowed us to take PE in the summer, for a couple weeks. It was only, maybe, a few hours a day. That way when school started we already had credit for it and none of us smelled awful (well most of us anyway).
What was so traumatizing about the showers available to you in high school? Because I certainly remember first period gym, and I just took a shower afterwards. Then I was right as rain.
It was partly social consequence, and party not wanting to be late for class. Since no one used the showers, the ones who did were usually considered weird or creepy. Even more so when the showers are open designed and you are naked in front of the entire locker room(high school only I think). The bigger half though is not wanting to be late for class. Most schools operate on a 5 minute timer between classes and even being a few seconds late is grounds for punishment. Being that you rarely ever get into the locker room and dressed back into your day clothes before the class is over, you're already pressed for time before you even consider using the shower.
Yep. When I went to high school, literally no one showered. I never saw a single person shower after gym class.
The thing that baffles me about it, is that if you're going to do physical activity like that, a shower after should be mandatory unless you are going home. Otherwise it's pretty gross. The result will be people not trying hard in gym, or people being unsanitary.
I guess this is all because we're ashamed of our bodies or afraid of sexual perverts? What the hell happened to us that we are this way?
I would have been afraid to shower in high school, the way it was. I have since showered in front of many strangers in the military and nothing bad has ever happened to me as a result. If you do have something odd happen, then that should be dealt with. But come on man, high school is not a prison. You are pretty safe to take a shower there.
tl;dr our society would rather be dirty and gross than see the naked bodies of our peers or be seen.
Middle schools already have partitioned showers. At least mine did, I imagine most others that have them do as well. The biggest issue with the showering are the time constraints. The social stigma is present, just in a minor fashion. Being late to class trumps all else.
The time constraints are imposed by a school administration that assumes you will not shower or does not want you to shower. The real problem is people are afraid of nudity.
My school didn't allow us to use the showers after PE. First period PE meant you could either minimize your participation or be sweaty all day. The showers were only available for the sports teams after school.
My middle and high schools both required showering after PE class. You had about 10 minutes to shower and dress after class. It was part of the grade actually, if you skipped the shower you got docked a letter.
As I recall it was because all the other teachers didn't want a bunch of sweaty smelly kids in their classes.
Middle school and high school kids can be viciously cruel and disgusting. Things that if done by adults would land them in jail and on a registry. Your school probably made the right call.
Probably the effort of getting ready once and then having to get ready again. Not traumatizing, just a pain. Some people are particular about their routines.
I really have no idea what this side tangent is about.
I made a comment that getting ready twice in short order is a pain, which is why people wouldn't want to have PE first thing.
I don't see what any of this has to do with the difference in showering schedules between white collar and blue collar labor.
My dad worked in a factory and showered after he got home from work. That was the time of day that made sense because his work was hot and sweaty and dirty.
I suppose the idea could have been that you could have just not showered at all and showered once you were done with PE, but still unsure where this detour is headed.
It’s a class marker, a sign of social status. Sweating is shameful, as is being low social status. You don’t see your father’s job, which he showered afterwards, as something shameful but loads of middle class people would because they’re insecure in their social status, they associated with people of similar income but lower social status. People with much higher status don’t care because they don’t, there’s no chance of them being associated with those with lower status.
Please stop jumping to the conclusion that I am off topic.
My thesis that ties this story together, and showering in PE class, is that some people see boats, guns, and sailors moving through the water, but are somehow incapable of acknowledging that it constitues a navy.
The result in this article, people do better when their awake, can be thought of as a frequency plot. This study effectively performed fourier analysis. They studied a comprehensive data set over a long enough time to deduce the cohesion that is evident when controlling for time.
Here's a thought experiment: can you empathize with a transistor? Imagine your a transistor, and I'm a transistor, and we can somehow still communicate. Im a pnp, and you're an npn:
npn: Its obvious that we're just transistors. You keep spouting nonsense about these logic gates, and how their the future. But please, show me the logic gate. I don't see it. You can't even tell me what it looks like.
pnp: look, when you put enough transistors together, you get an AND gate. In another configuration, you can get an OR gate.
npn: Please stop posting your controversial opinions here. This guy. I bet you're gonna tell me about magical flip flops and arithmetic logic units. Thats because you get all your news from science based sources. You should really try and get your information from a more diverse set.
That's great. I showered and then continued to sweat for 2 hours though (I was massively obese). HS Gym was a nightmare.
Funny enough, I did lose the weight, and am in much better shape now, through activities that are the antithesis of HS gym (turns out riding a bike and swimming for my own pleasure beat the torture of team sports any day)
But ask yourself this. Think back in time to those dreadful experiences and remember the people who didn't _appear_ to dread the experience.
Those people dreaded walking naked amongst their 14 year old peers as well, they just did a better job at convincing you that they dreaded it less than you.
You could even say that those were the victors who wrote your history.
Um, no. Other than some awkward jokes on the first few occasions, it was fine. Possibly this is because the school I went to was pretty new and didn't have any kind of established social hierarchy or bullying culture - it existed, but more as personal animosity.
I just laid out the derivative of your behavior, and then you said
"thats ridiculous, we quickly adapted over a short amount of time".
So, if I hear you correctly, what your saying is that as your understanding over time, lets call this du/dt, has a positive rate of change?
You're probably right though, the biggest trick Copernicus ever pulled was convincing everyone of heliocentricity by employing mathematics. We've been under the illusion ever since.
I wonder how they schedule that. Does that mean that all PE classes (assuming PE is part of the "unimportant" category) are either at the beginning or the end of the day? What does the PE teacher do in the middle of the day, then?
Often PE teachers (and coaches) are also teachers. My civics, geography and geometry teachers were all football coaches. Incidentally, they were also not very learned in their respective courses.
This was the same for us. The exception was the teacher that made me fall in love with history as a subject. He was also an assistant basketball coach, but he was passionate about history.
It probably depends on the size of the school or school district.
I went to large schools for both MS and HS, and all of our PE teachers only taught PE throughout the day, as it was offered all seven class periods as there were simply too many students to only offer the class two to three periods.
In HS, freshman tended to have the largest class sizes as they only had two class periods to choose from, and were split between male and female. They'd rotate through all sports during the school year. All other years got to choose their class period and were able to select the sport(s) they wanted, and would rotate through different teachers quarterly, within that same class period, based on those selections.
Coaches that only taught electives usually rotated in teaching Health/Sex Ed and Driver's Ed.
Yeah my high school had 2,500 students, there's no way they could've even fit everyone onto the field in the morning let alone have the staff to handle that.
This brings back memories for me. My friends and I realized even at a young age that we shouldn't have hard classes in the morning, and we almost always chose PE/arts first.
So and how about the people who would like to have the mentally intense stuff early in the morning? For example, I have the clearest mind about 5 minutes after I got out of bed.
That emphasizes that the purpose of school isn't as much to educate children as it is to provide an economy of scale for babysitting so that more adults can participate in the workforce.
I wonder how that dynamic will interact with the decreasing need for adults in the workforce.
It's not just economy of scale for babysitting, though that is a big component. In fact, the timing of compulsory education being enacted into law coincides with men coming back from the world wars and the creation of child labor laws, denying children the right to work so their parents could have better jobs. I'm not here advocating putting kids back in the factories, just pointing out the history.
In addition to that, I think it's clear that there's two curriculums at school: a spoken one and an unspoken one. The spoken curriculum is math, science, reading, etc. The unspoken curriculum is mass social indoctrination around conformity, complacency, and willingness to do boring work with minimal reward for long periods of time. Essentially, to psychologically prepare children for the realities of work life.
> denying children the right to work so their parents could have better jobs.
This is basically what I'm saying; educational requirements are an easy way to track the workforce. At the end of the wars, the labor market contracted hugely (as those soldiering jobs went away), so our society cut the least valuable workers out of the workforce. That it had humanitarian justifications, in that those workers also had the least personal agency and influence over their working conditions, is almost coincidental.
>In fact, the timing of compulsory education being enacted into law coincides with men coming back from the world wars and the creation of child labor laws, denying children the right to work so their parents could have better jobs.
Compulsory education in the US started in 1852 in Massachusetts and ended in 1918 in Mississippi:
Right, it's more that our society has decided that humans have no value until they're at least 18 (hell, with college degree requirements that age is approaching 22), so we have to store them somewhere until then.
That's a nice way of looking at it, and I'm not going to argue against it per se, but a cynical part of me thinks there's simply more money to be made by pushing loans on young adults and then using them in the workforce.
US student loan debt is somewhere around $1.4 trillion. For comparison, mortgage debt is somewhere around $8.9 trillion. That's a pretty damn big market. [0][1]
If that education was free, I'd wholly agree with you that it's simply our society deciding this is for the betterment of all. But when you combine these two sources of debt (student loans so we can get jobs that afford us home mortgages) then we're looking at a new, weird, first-world form of debt bondage. [2]
Again, I realize that's a very pessimistic point of view. Will be interesting to see how the history books view it in years to come.
That's a better way to put it; we've decided that humans' lifetime productivity is usually maximized by putting off the requirement that they be productive until later in their lives.
Does it make your nebulous conspiracy theory more believable or less believable when you consider that the age of 18 is generally when people's bodies have reached full maturity?
Personally, if my 22 year old self travelled in time three years backwards to meet 17 year old me, and then travelled 20 years forward to present day to me current me, I have no doubt 18 year old me would the odd man out in this triplet.
18 maybe for physical appearance, but mental maturity and brain development completes in the early-mid 20s. I would definitely be the odd one out at my current age if I were stuck with 17 and 22yo me, unless you were just using physical appearance, in which case yeah, I guess 17 would stand out.
Mental and social maturity continues developing for most of your life. Different life stages have different common problems, and you need to learn different skills to solve them - or sometimes just to cope with them.
In the same way that there isn't much practical (i.e. economic) interest in tailoring schools and college classes to people with different daily cycles, there isn't much interest in teaching people about common problems ahead of time, or running some kind of continuous life challenges training that could potentially do a lot to improve life quality.
In my 50s, one of the common problems my friends have is dealing with parents who are either dying, recently dead, or have a terminal illness like Alzheimer's.
Of course that happens to younger people too, but there are actuarial peaks where it becomes massively more likely that you'll be dealing with a certain set of challenges in a certain decade of life.
There's shockingly little information around about some of these challenges. So it's incorrect to assume that the learning ends after school or college.
You won't learn anything about dealing with these challenges there. You won't even be warned they exist.
I don't think it's particularly a "conspiracy theory", in that there's no cabal of people trying to cover this up. It's more an optimization function; we have N productivity units, and M humans (where M > N), so we hire from the most productive subsets of M. For the less productive subsets (largely youths, criminals, geriatrics), we encourage institutionalization to minimize the portion of M-productive required to maintain the unproductive ones.
If you look at post-industrialization patterns, the age at which humans become productive has been increasing as the productivity of humans has increased. On a subsistence farm, a 6-year old can be doing useful work to increase the productivity of the farm. In a coal mine or factory, an 8-year-old can do productive work. 16-year olds can do construction, food industry, but for jobs with decision-making responsibilities (as more and more jobs are today), we don't trust anyone under 22.
They have? Because last I checked puberty and physical growth tend to peter out around 13-14 for females and 15-16 for males (male growth plates seal at about 15; in females, about a year after menarche, and menses itself stabilizes about two years after menarche).
Does it make his nebulous conspiracy theory more or less believable that you somehow think the age at which we stop warehousing kids actually has nothing at all to do with physical maturation?
Allow me to contextualize all of your controversial deflection:
You specifically selected parts of the body that finish maturing earlier than my statement, because it was the most controversial thing that popped into your head. It didn't pop in to your growth plates, it didn't pop into your elbow. It didn't pop into your left middle toe. It popped into your head.
You should allow these very statements to marinate in that same head, and see if you can come to the correct conclusion as to which part of your body I was referring to in my original comment.
There are several countries in Europe that give maternity/paternity leave and vacation time to all full time employees by law. The result is not a massive drop in productivity, on the contrary studies have indicated higher overall productivity in many cases. There are things besides short term business gain that societies can invest in that can end up with everyone better off in the long run, even economically.
What does that have to do with school start times? Do parents take “parental leave” every morning to take their kids to school later? Of course not.
And maternity/paternity leave has little to do with school age kids.
France has the “genius” idea to have school only 4 days per week in most places. So Wednesdays off. Parents have to figure out what to do with their kids — they can’t exactly take off every Wednesday. And why does this 4 day week persist? Not because of ideal learning outcomes but because of teacher unions.
Europe isn’t better at everything and America isn’t worse at everything as people often like to suggest. And all of those great “benefits” people like to point out — they aren’t free. Salaries are dramatically lower in Europe and taxes higher — so even when all of these benefits are tallied, Americans still have more disposable income along with lower unemployment and a far more robust economy.
For sure there are great things about Europe, but don’t minimize America because it’s fashionable. Look at actual numbers.
> Salaries are dramatically lower in Europe and taxes higher — so even when all of these benefits are tallied, Americans still have more disposable income along with lower unemployment and a far more robust economy.
I wonder what you mean by "Americans", I really don't see how a minimum wage American part time worker has "more disposable income" than someone in Europe with any measure of health insurance?
Minimizing America may be fashionable, but the awful situation of a lot of working people in America is not at all made up, and, no, the money doesn't compensate it. It just compensates it (maybe) for software engineers.
As another commenter suggests, this isn't the same as flexible working hours.
And also, it doesn't fairly compare because this is legally forced, instead of letting the market determine such needs. The comment you're replying to is suggesting that naturally, companies which start earlier and aren't as accompanying of flexible working for parents, will do better in the market. Your comment doesn't debunk this theory.
Let me guess, you believe governments should be run like companies, right?
Perhaps, ask yourself why you come down on the side of moneyed interests in every point you make.
When I see this kind of dogmatic badgering, Its almost like my brain is superimposing a Fast Fourier Transform frequency plot on that person, and all of the energy is found to be in a single bin.
Your single bin is money. As this pure tone, it is literally your equation.
I don't have to tell you that this makes you give whores a bad name.
This crosses into personal attack. Please resist the temptation to do that even when you disagree strongly. It's particularly bad when combined with ideological battle, which is off topic on HN to begin with.
This isn't an agreement or disagreement with your underlying views; it's that you can't go offside when expressing them. Same applies to the other team.
(I was actually shocked that Americans don't always get paid holiday.)
Note that we also have 6 months paid maternity leave, and 1 weeks paid paternity leave, with both of those extendable on a lower pay rate.
New legislation from the 2010-2015 government allows parents to share this leave, even if they work at different companies, and start/stop it during the time when it would be taken (so mum can take the first 3 months off, then dad take a month off, then mum again, etc). Sorry for the hetero-normative example, adoptive parents also get paid leave in the same way.
It's actually six weeks maternity on nearly full pay and then about nine months 'statutory maternity pay' which is about £145 per week. Paternity leave is the same level as statutory maternity pay. Obviously individual companies can offer better deals than this. I got four months full pay with my job for example.
That doesn't source the actual claim that these reforms increased productivity. Everyone knows about vacation time rules in Europe, few have read economic analyses of them.
According to Gallup in 2013 the median incomes in the US and UK were $15,500 and $12,400 adjusted. Considering that US citizens pay on average 10% of earnings on healthcare where the UK doesn't that makes it more akin to $14,000 vs $12,400.
Except here is something you didn't know - that British citizen isn't paying income tax at all. Their 0% bracket goes all the way to about $16,000 USD Today. That US citizen is paying about $1650 in income tax because there is no 0% bracket in the US. So in actual take home income they are almost exactly the same. The mess of tax code in both countries makes the calculations more complicated, plus other taxes, etc - but the point is that no, U.K. citizens are not being paid "so much lower" than the US on average, but they do get the benefit of never dying of preventable illness because they can't afford to see a doctor while having all that extra aforementioned paid time off and holiday benefits that US workers don't have.
Additionally, the US isn't even at the top of median individual income. Fennoscandia collectively has the US beat, by on average about 20%. Which is going to be offset by their average ~25%ish income tax, but still its comparable returns.
It turns out that if your economy is abusing you to get more productivity out of you that you don't get a better living out of it.
US doesn't have a 0% tax rate, but there is the standard deduction and other tax credits that mean a large chunk of money gets exempted from income tax, often much more than just $16,000 USD.
Posting this a day later, so probably won't get seen much, but I just looked at my 2017 tax return.
I made ~$80k USD and because of various tax incentives (3 children mainly), I paid almost exactly the $1650 ($1683) figure you mentioned for federal income tax.
So my intuition is that the tax burden for most poor families is almost nothing.
I would expect self reported income like that to be based on take home pay (so after taxes). And for many in the US, they will have health benefits that they don't include in the self reported figure (they may not even realize the amount their employer pays). That's hard to account for compared to the "everybody can use the NHS" included in the UK figure.
From your link: 'Gallup asked respondents in most countries the following question: "What is your total monthly household income in [local currency], before taxes? Please include income from wages and salaries, remittances from family members living elsewhere, farming, and all other sources. Again, please provide your total monthly household income."'
I don't have any argument to make about relative quality of life between the US and other countries, because that's largely subjective. That being said, Fennoscandia is an aberration. They are monocultures with virtually no 3rd world immigration. By comparison the US actively seeks immigration from third world countries. There's a lot of political turmoil right there over this issue, immigration policy changes due to being in the EU, bringing in lots of refugees, etc. has brought in a lot of workers who are only really prepared for low skill/wage work, but these countries simply don't have those kinds of jobs available. They're having a hard time figuring out what to do with them.
> That being said, Fennoscandia is an aberration. They are monocultures with virtually no 3rd world immigration.
Untrue for Sweden[1] and Norway[2], which have respectively 14.3% and 16.8% of their populations foreign-born. Not all of those foreign-born are from developing nations but developing nations figure heavily in the top-30 list for Sweden.
Sweden is such a monoculture that when you look at Swedish demographics all Swedes are considered the same and you only count the immigrants as different. The second largest group of immigrants after Syrians is Finns, so a very similar culture. In the US if you look up demographics you barely see the 13% of the population which is foreign born as an *. Instead you get 17% hispanic, 13% black, ~62% white, 5% other. There's no accounting for the difference between a Mexican and a Cuban or a German and an Italian American. If you looked at Swedish demographics the same way it would be more like 95% white, 5% other. The largest single Church in the US is Baptist which accounts for barely 10% of the population. Meanwhile the Swedish National Church accounts for over 60% of the population, the second largest group is "unaffiliated" at 30%.
Norway is not significantly different when looked at in a similar light.
And, by the way, Netflix gives an entire paid YEAR off for maternity.
I wonder why? Could it be that competition has inspired them to compete? My point: free markets are a powerful thing. When there is no differentiation and everyone is “the same,” then it stifles innovation. Working at Peugeot is no more interesting than working for Renault. Which means their cars are going to be average. But if Peugeot were offering some great benefit, the best engineers would flock to Peugeot and that would result in better Peugeot cars. Renault, in order to compete would have to try and top Peugeot, which then leads to great engineers going there.. and so on until competition pressures ultimately drive companies to higher and higher levels of success and innovation. Just like what happens in Silicon Valley. Instead, in Europe, you have this malaise, this equalitarianism that inspires nobody. There is a lack of ambition.
So 5000 Netflixers having pretty fantastic maternity leave is your answer for tens of millions of Europeans having pretty fantastic maternity leave?
Arithmetic is actually pretty useful for thinking about what more labor friendly laws might do in the US. Say you decide that every employee should get a paid day off if they work for 240 hours (this is 6 weeks full time, so someone averaging 30 hours a week would receive 6.5 paid days off each year). How much would that cost? It would cost right around 3% of what they are already being paid. And since we know people with no paid time off are working low leverage jobs, we can probably infer that it would come right out of the consumer surplus that their employee provides to customers.
But sure, let's pretend that some small baseline of non-hell would erode ambition in people competing for jobs at Netflix.
Unfortunately for your argument, companies in the UK also compete by offering paid maternity leave longer than the legal minimum - like PWC which offers an entire paid YEAR.
Why the focus on IT? Automobiles, trains, embedded controllers, space and commercial flight, weapon systems, high-tech manufacturing. All those are areas where Europe has at least one industry leader.
There are so many companies you never hear about because you aren't in the industry they operate in.
Because the question was about outcompeting. Automobiles, etc., there are many competitors, including some American. And weapon systems, there is a national security reason to maintain regional leaders, no matter how inefficient.
In IT, I find it funny that Google has a higher market share in Europe than in the US.
Why outcompete? Why the need for a quasi-monopoly? Why can't half a dozen companies work a market in competition and create better products for everyone? Many problems with Facebook and Google come from not it outcompeting other companies and making things worse for society as a whole.
About 1/4 of Norway's GDP is oil and gas (US is about 7%). Ireland is a particularly ironic choice given their recent GDP growth and subsequent dip were mostly from being a tax haven for wealthy US companies.
I wouldn't personally attribute either of these to better educational or societal systems.
Are we going to ignore the effects of immigration and the comparative policies of both nations here, or just pretend that a mostly-homogenous nation like Norway (or other Scandi countries) should be equally compared to the United States?
Comparing the USA as a whole to Ireland or Norway is ludicrous. Compare it to the EU, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. If you want to compare Ireland to the US you should be looking at individual states. If you insist on comparing to individual countries at least look at ones that are at least a tenth of the population of the US, like France, Gernany, the U.K., Russia, Turkey, Italy, Ukraine.
Ireland’s gdp per capita overstates its wealth substantially as large parts of the economy by value is subsidiaries of US companies which repatriate profits back to the US. For economies like Ireland and Luxembourg better to use gross national product than gross domestic product.
Better again to use average individual consumption but statistics on that have only just begun to be gathered. Average household consumption makes the US look pretty great. The only country higher is the UAE and the top 5 is rounded out by Hong Kong, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Petrostates, city states and the US.
You can't value economic success solely on the size and influence of companies. In Germany (Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg especially) there are literally thousands of very successful small-middle tier engineering firms doing highly specialized work in very specific areas. It might not be Facebook or Google or even BMW in terms of size and influence, but they are the very core of the economic success in these states.
In EU we didn't have the same amount of military government spending that you folks had. Most of the technological base for the ICT revolution was paid by the US taxpayer on the grounds of beating - or at least keeping in check - the Russians in a war. But yeah, even Ayn Rand got her assistance from government, why not her followers?
If you think every form of natural selection is automatically proof that whatever came out is the best option, then you do not understand evolution at all.
He didn't say that at all. The only fact you can derive from evolution is that some things existed, and now they either do or don't exist. That's exactly what he is saying.
You could argue that maybe some solutions were not even tried before, or that they were tried and abandonned for random reasons. But actually, since the evolution process took a long time, we can reasonably say that we are witnessing the mean outcome of these events. Aka, in this case, the overwhelming majority is a work-related school schedule.
This doesn't invalidate 'free schools' such as Montessori, as these could be good local solutions. They just apparently don't scale to the ensemble of society since they didn't yet and had plenty of time to do so.
Another remark : this doesn't apply to things that were recently invented or discovered.
Outcompeted in what sense? Making money? I mean, I guess if you argue that the people who did it will on average have more political influence due to having more money then it's plausible, but there's an even more plausible argument: People in charge of major organisations don't like worker flexibility because it's logistically difficult, and "more work-oriented == better productivity" is the most intuitive meme ever, so it caught on.
Outcompeted in the sense of still existing, whereas the other doesn't exist anymore... I don't find it very reasonable to jump to more specific conclusions, such as arguments over money or political influence. There could be millions of other important variables.
I too struggled for years during adolescence with early school start times and being generally super tired for the first 1 or 2 classes of each day. As an adult I also realize the pragmatic nature of school start times supporting our fairly typical 9-to-5 work culture.
However, I think it's important that we try to learn from this emerging data. If a body of empirical evidence starts strongly suggesting that starting school 1-2 hours later will improve information retention and learning, and if we collectively wish to maximize the success and potential of our youth then we must begin to change in order to support these goals.
I hope that by the time my future child reaches school age we will have begun to embrace a more data-driven approach to learning along with the necessary support structures to support such a change. Perhaps labor laws could be constructed to allow for more morning flexibility for parents that can demonstrate they are the legal guardian of a child whose age is between some range. I'll hope for the best.
There are different methods of schooling! Granted, they're more work for the parent, usually costly, might not work with a normal 9-5 schedule, and a bunch of other potential problems.
But if you have the resources, you can look for what you believe would be the best path for your future kid.
That makes sense to a degree, but it always killed me that in my school district had elementary school starting at 8:30, and high school at 7:15. They told us that it was to stagger the buses and give high schoolers time to work part-time jobs, but it was rough. Especially because the bus ride took another hour out of the morning.
Also, most elementary schools around there offered before and after school programs that working parents can leverage to fit their schedules. That, and neighbors who took turns watching the bus stop to make sure everyone made it on time, gave us enough support to get to school when parents were on tight work schedules.
> It starts this early so parents can get their kids to school and start working afterwards, without getting fired.
Numerous teachers in my school told me the real reason school doesn't start later is because of... wait for it: Sports.
Sports games/teams often finish practice/games as late as 6-8pm, especially after traveling for a game - and that's with a district whose high school started at 7:40am and middle school at 8am.
Is it too much for schools to actually prioritize academics over sports? Colleges are the same way.
Sports could happen in the morning if school started later, they tend to be more free daycare than the root cause here. Sports have become a priority in schools, which will cause teachers to become resentful and blame them for everything.
I doubt it. You figure an hour to gather and travel to a game location, 2 hours for the game, an hour to return... schools would have to start at noon.
And can you blame them? Why are sports being prioritized by institutions whose existential purpose has nothing to do with athletics?
>I doubt it. You figure an hour to gather and travel to a game location, 2 hours for the game, an hour to return... schools would have to start at noon.
If you guess it would take five hours, they could gather at 5 AM and school starts at 10.
>And can you blame them?
No. Doesn't change that they would be unfairly blaming this particular issue on sports.
For some, a bus simply doesn't exist. For others, there is legitimate concerns over the safety of their children -- I would not feel comfortable leaving my kindergartener or first grader walk to a bus stop almost half a mile away at essentially the wee hours of the morning when it is still dark outside.
If you are the kid who lives at the first stop, sometimes your bus time is as early as 5:55. I would never force my child to be up at 5 something to get ready for school. That is beyond ridiculous.
Finally, there are legitimate concerns over bullying. Kids are ruthless on the bus and is a real problem. When I attended high school almost two decades ago now -- fights, bullying, name-calling and harassing were common -- sometimes by the bus driver themselves! I can only imagine how much worse it is now.
Young children are naturally early risers and it's entirely appropriate that their school hours start early and allow parents to drop them off. It's high school and college students that would benefit from later start times and can be trusted to get to class themselves.
The bus system in most of the US really is terrible.
There is 1 adult to supervise 40 kids and drive a bus. I wasn't really bullied that much as a kid because I was always about a head taller than everyone else, but any bullying I did experience was on the bus.
What concerns make you feel uncomfortable? Do you feel uncomfortable leaving your children with close friends or family as well, since statistically most abuse occurs from someone in that group?
Why on earth would parents be personally taking their children to school? When I lived in a sprawling exurb, there was a school bus stop a couple blocks away supervised by another neighborhood parent. When I lived in a more compact suburb, everyone walked - again, in groups.
Something is catastrophically broken about your urban planning, school system, or community if every family is personally driving the kids to school. Maybe this meta-problem needs to be solved before addressing start times.
My kids' elementary school doesn't start until 9:00, and both of us work. We've had to get morning childcare just for 30 minutes before school. It's expensive and stressful for all of us.
Every person is a little different. One of our kids is definitely very alert and ready to learn in the early morning. The other one, unfortunately, isn't. The one-size-fits-all schedule is much more for the convenience of adults than for the effectiveness of education, unfortunately. Some of the other commenters point out that important things should not be too early or late. That may well work better. But I'd be a little worried that there is no such thing as one good schedule that works for every child or even a significant fraction of children.
I did too, but I always assumed that if school started an hour later I'd go to bed an hour later and still struggle to get up. Why do you think it would be different?
I did try living by my own biological clock and it was a complete disaster. Ruined my life for several years. My natural clock is non-24, but not by much, no more than 25 hours. So if left to my own devices I naturally drift "West" every single day. The only way I can cope is to take strict control of my wake up times and force myself into a 24 hour cycle.
The phase is irrelevant to me. So if I'm going to take control I get up earlier because I find that is more productive for me. I hate every single morning of my life, but if I let my clock do what it wants I hate my entire life.
That sucks but could also be true for me. My best performance is when I sleep when I feel to and wake up when I want to. Which works pretty well once you break all the social norms.
I am one of those long sleepers. One time my job hours were cut in half and I took only 4-5 hour afternoon work. My productivity was pretty much the same than with 8 hours before.
I wish more employers would be more flexible with time.
I've always been a morning person. Even as a kid I remember waking up with the sun because sleeping always felt like a waste a time with so much fun stuff to do.
This is probably a generational thing. When I was kid almost all the fun things to do were outside. Surf, ski, swim in the river, fish, sports, etc... all were daytime and outside. We had a NES, and later a SNES but we only used those when it was raining :)
A lot of it is due to athletics - my school had to end practices before certain times and could not offset the school day without blowing away athletic programs.
> It starts this early so parents can get their kids to school and start working afterwards, without getting fired.
As a working parent, totally agree. Employers should be more accommodating for working parents just like they do for maternity/paternity programs, but they haven't yet.
Big corporations with HR and dedicated benefit personnels are more tolerable than most startups, unfortunately.
In every company Ive worked so far (small to middle sized software places in switzerland ) it was the most normal things that parents, especially with young kids, can get plenty of freedom with their time within reason.
I was really surprised to see this is not the standard in the software world (where you can do your job just as well in overshifts to compensate for lost hours)
I downvoted you because it didn't seem productive to try to start an argument about why people are specifically talking about parents in the context of discussions specific to students and their parents.
And you felt it necessary to pretend that people are explicitly trying to give parent's special treatment over non-parents, which isn't something I've seen anyone in this thread argue for.
And now I've gone and derailed the discussion further and given you the argument you were looking for.
> I downvoted you because it didn't seem productive to try to start an argument about why people are specifically talking about parents in the context of discussions specific to students and their parents.
That's fair, my comment does sort of sway. I'd delete it if HN let, my apologies.
To be fair, I did ask what it meant exactly, which was what I led with - but you're right, I did ask a second question.
I'm Still unsure what it means, exactly.
> And you felt it necessary to pretend that people are explicitly trying to give parent's special treatment over non-parents, which isn't something I've seen anyone in this thread argue for.
No, I didn't. I'm not going to argue the root, because you're right, it detracts from the conversation at large. Yet, I was not pretending by any stretch. (ie, my intent was not fake, again, this is not an argument, no one comment lol)
Our school district just spent the last year trying to convince parents we should shuffle around start times to make high school later and elementary school earlier.
It was a complete clusterfuck. Both teacher and parents alike at both the elementary and the high schools all had a million reasons why it couldn’t possibly work. Since there are a limited number of buses which are shared, you can’t move one start time without moving the other.
It came up at every school event, sports practice, kids party, to the point where I would just walk away when people starting bitching about it one way or another.
The biggest issue was we had a new superintendent who wanted to “start a dialogue” about the start times rather than actually make a policy change. It took up hundreds of hours in PTO, Administrative, and Town Hall meetings and of course ended up in absolutely no change in the end. Everyone’s opinion of course had to be heard, whether it was a longer commute that a teacher would have, or then not having time to drop off their own child before getting to class, or impacting afternoon sports, or the something about the bus route, or... Of course none of the debate actually addressed if students would possible learn better from it.
I was so glad when they finally sent out the email saying they were dropping it just so that I wouldn’t have to hear the constant bickering.
It was like an engineering team with no lead and a non-technical manager arguing over what DBMS to use where no decision could be made until everyone agreed we had the “right” solution!
It's happening where I live too. It's amazing how quickly the discussion moves past "what's best for students" and into the "it's annoying to me personally" and "when I was a kid, we suffered" conversations.
To be fair, "I got fired from my job because I couldn't get there on time anymore because school starts too late" isn't particularly good for the children of the people getting fired either.
Not everyone is a programmer in the Valley or East Coast that can just Slack their manager "will be an hour late today because X!" and everything is fine. For the vast majority of people, even white collar employees, not being at work at 9 a few times may mean termination.
That's very true. Many workers have to go to work with medical problems, take desperate measures if they have car issues, and lose their job if they get arrested.
If you've already missed 1 day for "my car broke down" and another for "I was vomiting", that one time you need to get the kid to school might be your 3rd strike.
A cynical explanation here would be: those in charge wanted the appearance of having considered these changes without the headache / political risk of actually changing them.
Absolutely correct. The superintendent didn’t have the clout necessary to pull it off. What I think she underestimated was the sheer volume of discussion which would ensure which basically made it impossible to get any other policy changes done last year.
What blew my mind was how parents of elementary school students somehow needed the late start time to make their work possible and parents of high school students needed the late start time... to make their work possible.
I tried explaining that parents of high school students almost certainly were once parents of elementary school children, and those elementary school parents will almost certainly one day have kids in high school, but gave up.
The best part was the parents who had kids in both schools who would still argue against the change :-)
It is generally understood that students ages 14-18 are substantially more self-sufficient than students ages 6-11.
Speaking for myself, I was largely self-sufficient in terms of managing my day at 14. My peers were as well. The major inconvenience of the early hours was being unable to chaperone a younger sibling.
If there was a will, teenagers would be allowed to come sooner or on bike or fully by themselves.
If raising children would be really considered important, caregivers needa would not be treated with "shut up and do the things the most complicated way".
For that matter, calling school that starts an hour sooner then optimal "calous" is overly hyperbolic, manipulative and dramatic.
> For that matter, calling school that starts an hour sooner then optimal "calous" is overly hyperbolic, manipulative and dramatic.
Do you know how miserable it is to be chronically sleep deprived for, like, a decade? Yes, it's callous to make someone suffer like that for the convenience of everyone else.
You can and should go to bed earlier. Learning to go to sleep is important part of adulthood.
The debate about whethe start an hour later or sooner due to natural rhythms is completely pointless for students that don't sleep even minimal needed amount of hours. Those need to fix "hours slept" metric first.
Yeah let's ignore the research that shows teenagers literally have a shifted sleep schedule and can't actually go to sleep early in a reliable manner.
What's going on here is that we don't give a shit about people, and we like pretending that the world is fair, so whenever we're committing an atrocity (yes, this is an atrocity, sleep deprivation is a form of torture), we try to blame it on the victim. Because "we have generated an atrocity, built our society around it, and are now trying to not come to terms with that" is a tougher pill to swallow than "teenagers just all, universally, suck".
This is garbage and I really wish parents would start seeing this as a big issue, big enough to raise hell not just with their school, but with their job and with society at large. Parents sure seem to have enough energy to cause teachers problems...
Sleep deprived person is able to sleep in the dark. Try again. And no, even if suboptimal, middle class teenagers don't go through atrocity nor torture.
If you actually went to bed and stayed there and could not sleep anyway despite being horribly sleep deprived, then you really should visit some sleep center to help you. It is not nearly the same as mild performance drop due to having suboptimal sleep time.
I'm not sure what you're even trying to say. This is about chronotypes and a teenager-specific sleeping pattern that has been identified and studied.
Sleep deprivation is torture, this is not my definition. Sorry, we, as a society, decided that not letting people sleep properly is really fucking crappy. If you want to disagree with that, take that up with the party that came up with the terms. Messing with someone's sleep is a major offense, and there are various ways in which it can happen, and psychology recognizes them, even if you don't.
Yes, I'm sure most teenagers have means to go to a sleep center, with their full human rights and disposable income. And when pretty much every teenager has this problem I'm sure that's a good use of resources.
I don't know about this man... I get your point but it's a little over dramatic.
My 13 year old girl lives with us half the time. Her other parent the other part of the time.
They let her keep her phone with her all the time. She can completely skip sleeping entirely for more than 2 days when she has her phone all night, texting with friends. She's having fun, but then she crashes and burns HARD when she comes back to our house. Get's sick, can't focus, emotions out of control.
At my house we take her phone away at 10:00pm, and she is passed out 5 minutes later. Funny thing is, I sometimes take away the phone on Sunday, in the afternoon, and she will pass out 5-10 minutes after that too.
Her body just needs a lot more sleep than it is getting. This is probably true with a lot of adults too. We use electronic stimulus to keep us going far beyond our "natural rhythms". Take those away and people can sleep.
If the natural rhythm of a teenager is to be unable to sleep until 2:00am, what are they supposed to do if they ever change time zones? People may have a naturally tendency to be a night owl or whatever, but that is hardly the most important element in the sleep deprivation story going on right now.
This. I mentioned up above that I've always been a morning person along with most of my friends. But, I didn't grow up with a device attached to me. Most of my activities growing up were outside. Going to school early meant more daylight after school to play. Even on weekends I was up with the sun, and often earlier since the surf was typically better early. All spring and summer we would be up at ~4:30am to go fishing. Kids staring at devices all hours of the day has had an enormous impact on their lives that I'm not sure we fully understand yet.
I've never been a morning person. Always been awake late and struggled to wake up in the morning. Imagine how it feels to have people dismiss this as a problem with screen time when I grew up without any screens! (Literally - not even a TV).
I think you will find that people like to generalize everything to black and white so things make sense when in reality there are much more complex things at play, not to mention that humans are not designed to fit one mold. Somehow this is a commonly accepted truth when it comes to baby with “all babies are different” but when focus shifts to teens and adults we are supposed to be neatly organized into cstegories and labels. Pleeeeeeeease...
My point being, your situation is not necessary comparable to others. Case in point, as a child I had a difficult time falling asleep at night without screens. I woke up late and was always tired in the morning. You might attribute this to a number of some factors we probably don’t have time to discuss here. Now, as a teenager I was able to fall asleep like a rock on most days but was still tired the next day in class. I can’t tell ya how many times I’ve heard “that lazy guy” Label being applied to myself and others who shared this trait because imo it’s too convenient to label someone rather than trying to understand the underlying issues.
In any case, I tend to agree that school most definitely starts too early for a growing human being whose development takes place at night and specifically mostly during slee when body is at rest. Is it a surprise then that a developing body requires more sleep? Circadian cycles or not, kids should probably start school at a later time. Now, whether society can accept this and modify adult schedules around new findings is a question not easily answered. I suspect for this to happen, society as a whole will need to move away from 9-5 or at least become more remote and or flexible.
Enforcing sleep deprivation is torture. But that goes far beyond having a terrible wake-up hour. If you can sleep freely in the same 12 hour window each day, you're not being forcibly sleep deprived.
That is not caused by different natural rhytme, that is caused by them not going to sleep till they are exhausted. It does not happen if they are not allowed to watch TV or browse the net or chat of social whatever and are sent to bed by parents.
That pop culture cliché also have only kids who don't give a fuck about anything doing that. And it is fuelled by it being perceived as cool. Overwhelming majority of students don't sleep during class.
I mentioned it because I was one of those kids. There was nothing "cool" about it, and I found my persistent insomnia, relative to high school schedules, frustrating at best. I got detentions several times for falling asleep in the middle of classes I personally found interesting.
I am pretty confident that that level of insomnia is not cause by normal teenager sleep patterns. If you can't sleep so much that you sleep in sch ool, then your problem is medical.
That’s what it is here except reversed — buses do the high school run first, and the discussion was around reversing it - like you would think it would have been from the start.
> night owls were especially vulnerable, many appearing so chronically jet-lagged that they were unable to perform optimally at any time of day.
I experienced this with an 8am biology class I was required to take. It wrecked my whole day. About 1/3 of the way through I just started skipping the class and then later getting notes of the lecture from a friend of mine. It ended up working dramatically well. I got an A, while my friend who got up every MWF to take the notes, got a B. It was kind of a wild result since my studying was based almost entirely on her notes. I hadn't given it too much thought, but it would make sense if being sleep deprived is what hurt her in this case.
Anecdotally, (and as a story for anyone similar to me/with kids similar to how I was) I spent most of my life until college thinking that school/learning was the most miserable process in the world, and that I was terrible at it.
It turns out, waking up at ~6 every morning, and usually not going to bed until 10/12 thanks to after school classes and homework, left me with less sleep than I even need to be functional now as an adult and turned highschool into a special sort of "kid jail".
I got punished innumerable times for sleeping in class, and probably spent more time by % fighting to keep my eyes open than I did paying attention. (I had at least one teacher who threw chalk at students who slept, it was such a common occasion)
This changed like a lightswitch when in college I was able to assert that I didn't take any classes before 10. By the end of my masters I had a 4.0 (highschool had been a struggle to maintain a 3.0 with much easier classes), although it took most of that time to re-learn how to learn and pay attention. The difference was so stark it puts a fire in my belly just to think about the amount of resistance I've seen to changing this status quo. I recognize this is "for adults/work" but as a working adult I refuse to concede that we can't come up with a solution that doesn't so entirely steamroll some kids for being wired to need more sleep.
My worst semester at University I had three 8am lectures... I knew I was a bit of a night owl, but at this point I didn't realise that I actually had a severe sleep disorder. I had just assumed that what people said (you just have to be disciplined, just go to be earlier, etc.) was potentially true, which was demoralising. It was actually pretty liberating to find out about differences in circadian rhythms. I still get similar bad advice, which is about as useful as "just be happier" is to a clinically depressed person...
College was rough for me, I felt best sleeping on a 3am to noon schedule and half of my required classes could only be scheduled before noon. I managed to get through it but still felt like I was unable to learn as effectively as I could have. I also recall being a zombie in high school because I was forced to wake up at 6 every day and could not fall asleep until midnight, and at the time my body required much more sleep than I was getting...
From age 12 to 23 I thought something was wrong with me as a human because I was tired, depressed,and anxious but I've learned that when I sleep well those symptoms disappear. Life has been much better since I gained more control over my schedule.
I remember in my high school classes kids were always super tired in am. On many occasions where we had subs come in and put on a movie, many kids would just fall asleep. I had to fake being awake by pretending to be looking down between the desk and my legs and when the teacher walked by I would just “pick up” my pen and get right back to work - I was sleeping the whole time.
How did/do you deal with your different circadian rhythm? I have a friend who can easily sleep 12 hours at a time and consistently goes to bed past 3am and wakes up in the afternoon (and has also dealt with depression in the last). I’m wondering what else I can do to help besides push for no screen time past 10pm etc.
Sleeping 12 hours at a time frequently is hypersomnia (at least if actually sleeping, not just in bed unable to sleep). The wikipedia page on hypersomnia links to a number of things that can cause it, including depression. If possible, getting evaluated for sleep apnea is a good idea since that is at least fairly easy to treat (even if the treatment is rather annoying :/). I have Non-24 and insomnia and had hypersomnia when I was younger.
There is a mailing list mentioned there for people with circaidian rhythm disorders, a good way to hear about what works or doesn't work for other people (you don't need to join the organization to subscribe). There is a huge amount of individual variation both in how people are affected and what helps deal with it. Some people do well if they stick to their internal schedule and some of us don't. Unfortunately, there isn't really good treatment for circadian disorders and trying to live on the shifted schedule can be the easiest for for people who do well on that schedule (which is not to say easy as finding a job on such a schedule can be very difficult).
The standard treatment recommendation is melatonin and avoiding light before bed and light therapy in the morning. This works for some people, at least for a while, but not for most people (I'd recommend putting some effort into trying to adjust the schedule, just know that it might not work). If avoiding all screen time is too difficult, I recommend turning the color temperature on f.lux or redshift way down (I use 2500K). Also worth noting that trying to adjust your schedule by shifting forward can turn DSPS into Non-24 (that is what happened for me, and the CSD-N survey shows it has happened to a bunch of people while only a few find it helpful), so I'd highly recommend against that (unfortunately some sleep doctors recommend it). Also, stay away from benzos; they don't work long term but are addictive.
I haven’t yet... Managed to convince work to let me come in at 10-10:30am and I typically work until 6:30-7pm, or leave a bit earlier and do an extra hour or so from home at 9 or 10pm. So I still do a standard amount of hours for full-time here, just shifted back one or two hours.
Apparently your sleep cycle does slowly get earlier as you age so maybe I’ll be able to do 9am to 5:30 in a decade or so! I may go back to the doctor and try melatonin supplements or something, but as long as work’s OK with it I’m doing alright.
It’s hard to go to bed earlier because of interruptions and noise levels on campus, but if they can be managed, so can this problem. The idea that there is some innate biological problem is silly IMO. Young people have no unusual difficulty adjusting to time zones when traveling, but they do have computers and cell phones that are like brain cocaine and very difficult to self manage. I started scheduling shut off times for my kids’ cell phones and magically they now get up more bright eyed and get themselves to school on time.
Though I suppose there is a self-talk component too, whereby if you convince yourself it’s an innate problem (you’re young, you’re a developer, you’re special) then it might feel more like one. I used to tell myself I couldn’t exercise in the morning, a belief I maintained into my forties, then one year I needed to, after about a month of getting used to it, I was then a morning exerciser...
So they have a hard time getting to sleep on time - but it is because of behavior patterns. If it were due to maladaptive body clock regulation there would be evidence of poor adaptation when traveling to different time zones. If it were due to melatonin dysfunction there would be some wild swings in affected populations between summer and winter periods. Instead this is fully explained by routines. Just ask the college swim team who have to get up at 4/5am to train before class, how do they get up so early? They get to bed early.
This is so idiotic. The argument is not about how to wake up on time, the point being made is that you are not as attentive when your circadian rhythm is misaligned with tasks that require a high degree of attention.
What is so idiotic is the concept of a natural circadian rhythm that is being claimed out of correlation studies of social cohorts, when there is no fundamental hypothesis to support the idea that young/old people have innately different rhythms.
I agree with you that people do not perform when their rhythms are not in sync with their lives’ demands. However commenters and the article writers are inferring there is some inherent trait that prevents their body clock from adapting.
Even when I'm very deliberately making sure there are no distractions (no lights on, no electronics, fan for white noise) and/or I'm exhausted (been awake for >2 days), I find it _very_ difficult to sleep before 3am, and that time will gradually slip back to the point where it's often easier to skip a night's sleep to "resync" my sleep schedule. Probably not the case for every one, but it's difficult to not see that as some innate difference, especially as it has persisted for years across multiple environments.
What is the biological property of 3am to you? Is it a particular time of darkness? Is it a set point of time after you have woken up? What happens when you travel to a different time zone, do you adapt?
As I understand it, it's more of an internal clock that can be shifted by sunrise/sunset light/dark - but there appear to be a biological/inherited component. Hence some mammals have evolved a rhythm more dependent on seasons than day/night, due to polar day/night cycles:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41942188_A_Circadia...
Which in turn might imply that humans still being rather young species is tuned to a rather strict day/night cycle, as seen close to the equator.
This strategy worked well for me too until Circuit Theory. As an "early morning"[] class it was easy to bum the notes from somebody else, but the darn quizzes tanked my grades enough that I had to repeat the course the next available semester.
This study was done on college students, not elementary and HS students, college students at Cal. There are a lot of caveats here and trying to apply them to elementary education is good, but outside the scope.
Aside: If you really want test scores to improve, give the kids food. My SO is an educator and she's had kids come in that only get food at school. All weekend they may only eat a bag of Cheetos, sometimes up to 2/3 kids on Monday mronings. School breakfast and lunch are sometime the only food they get.
Agreed. Many schools (my kid's school) also provide 'weekend packs'. It's hard to know how much of that gets to the kids, but poverty is a hell of a problem.
Yes, feeding low-income students is critical. However, we have to ask if the school-lunches provided are indeed better than a bag of Cheetos? I worked in the top 3 worst middle school in my state in the poorest city in my state, and I found their school lunches to largely be processed carbs like pizza, burger+fries with no veggies. The veggies that were on offer were in tiny sauce-containers that hardly any of the kids grabbed. Furthermore, those veggies were usually carrots or cucumbers, the former of which is high in glycemic index, and the latter of which contains hardly any micronutrients. So, from a nutritional perspective, yes the calories are good for the low income students, but the food was still terrible for them overall.
I disagree with ideas that school schedules should shift later. I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times. We have fully disrupted our circadian rhythms with our lifestyles and especially screens/lights at night. Before artificial light, our sleep/wake schedule was set by the sun.
I know we live in a different world today, but I feel like shifting our schedule because of poor sleep hygiene and bad light habits is kind of reinforcing a bad habit. Whose to say that the shift wouldn't just perpetuate itself even after a shift of 1 hour later.
It is a mischaracterization to say this is all the result of bad habits. Asking teens and young adults to perform between 6 and 9 is like asking a fully mature adult to perform between 3 and 6.
> I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times.
This is absolutely not true for adolescents continuing through young adulthood. Adolescents naturally have a delay in morning alertness levels compared to fully mature adults and other children and also have sleepiness set in more slowly/later in the evening than either other group. It is not (necessarily) poor sleep hygiene which causes teens to stay up later, but their own biological processes.
> Before artificial light, our sleep/wake schedule was set by the sun.
This seems to be an argument in favor of changing times. My highschool started at 7:10. Assuming I woke up an hour before to shower, dress, and catch the bus, that means I had to wake before the sun every day of my highschool career. The only time the sun rose earlier than 6:10 was during the summer when I didn't have school.
> It is not (necessarily) poor sleep hygiene which causes teens to stay up later, but their own biological processes.
I'm genuinely curious about this, do you have links to evidence of this? You're asserting a certain causal order, but everything I've seen such as the article this thread is purely observational so doesn't say anything about the causality of it.
Abstract:
Sleep deprivation among adolescents is epidemic. We argue that this sleep deprivation is due in part to pubertal changes in the homeostatic and circadian regulation of sleep. These changes promote a delayed sleep phase that is exacerbated by evening light exposure and incompatible with aspects of modern society, notably early school start times. In this review of human and animal literature, we demonstrate that delayed sleep phase during puberty is likely a common phenomenon in mammals, not specific to human adolescents, and we provide insight into the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.
I seem to recall a recent paper about hunter-gatherer watchkeeping; that certain age groups would be more alert at certain times. That one paper wasn't all that convincing, but it's an interesting idea.
We used to shift our schedule pretty much daily. Outside of the equator, the night shifts pretty majorly throughout the year. And at the equator, the sun is deadly during the day. Such that our ancestors probably slept as often during the day as the did some nights.
Not to say we shouldn't work on sleep hygiene, but the myth that it is a modern crisis is misguided. Used to, people blamed caffeine. Just look for numbers to see how much more coffee used to be consumed.
All of that said, much of the difficulties in education for kids are also explainable by our bar just being higher. Much higher. But, I'd rather our methods improve. Not lowering our expectations.
Do you have any evidence to support those claims, specifically that night owl's "natural" sleep cycle falls in line with school times? There is substantial biological evidence that phenotypes for night owls vs. morning larks do actually exist. Are you suggesting it is "natural" for a night owl to be focused at 8am, which is around the average start time for the earliest classes in our education system?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the study itself didn't look near this rigorous. It looks like they made 3 buckets and tried to correlate them with performance. How can you do that and they say "aha! look! circadian rhythms"?
How do we know that the students who stayed up late aren't also the students that procrastinate and do all their work last minute, and thus recieve lower grades?
That seems like just as reasonable a conclusion to draw.
No, changes in circadian rhythm with age are fairly constant across human societies, though we westerners do have our additional pathologies. Teenage bushmen tend to stay up later than their parents just like teenage westerners do. Making teenagers wake up earlier than younger children is just a bad idea.
It is about meeting in the middle. I had a job when I had to be in office at 9 and it was just a nightmare, because to get on time I had to wake up early and only able to sleep 5 hours. Another job was more flexible and I was able to get in at 10. That meant over 6 hours of sleep for me. Imagine the difference between sleeping 5 hours every night or 6-7. This is a huge difference, by shifting things later by an hour. It wouldn't make a difference for morning person.
Like many I was certainly a night owl in college. But this idea that it’s impossible for students to change their sleep schedules seems... odd. By that logic no one could ever move across time zones. College students in particular tend to like to stay up late for social and other reasons. But that’s different from being unable to get up earlier. It also isn’t only classes that are early but some athletics as well.
During college, I used to play WoW. I think my biological clock was messed up because of it, not because that was my natural biological rhythm. Also, because of the amount of hours I put into WoW, I did not have many hours left to study, affecting my academic performance. Thus, I wonder if the performance is really linked to the biological rhythm, or rather that the biological rhythm is a sign of activities impacting academic performance.
I'm with you there. I think the article is bullshit. We are in control of when we go to sleep, and ultimately that determines our circadian rhythm. Not some mysterious unknown force. The correlation with alcohol and drug abuse is a cause not a result.
I was very much in the camp of playing video games all night long but I didn't kid myself about early class times being the cause for my struggle.
* Disclaimer: IANA doctor/biologist. Point me to a study that says we can't control when we go to sleep (aside from other health factors including insomnia).
Both. And the social strain of not being able to meet people that work on regular schedules.
I seem to recall that working just regular night shifts (eg 2300-0700) will cut an average 5 years off your life. Rotating shifts with half+ during night is even worse.
While I would like to agree with the article and say it's something else's fault, it's totally my own doing that I stay up late watching TV or playing games. It's not my "biological" clock keeping me up, it's the stimulus I'm getting that's keeping me up, especially with games. I'm sure if I pulled myself from a screen starting at 9pm, I'd be asleep by 10 or 11 instead of 1:30am
Yep, this. During summer internships in college I easily transitioned to a fully-functioning 11PM-7AM sleep schedule, but university's manifold distractions pushed me to a 2AM-10AM schedule. And in high school I was chronically exhausted because I'd stay up playing Counter Strike until 12AM every night (in retrospect this probably also limited my achievement in XC and track...). Of course this is all anecdotal.
There's also the well documented impact of blue/led light on keeping your brain awake. You definitely get into chicken/egg scenarios with playing games all night, but having a clear screen time cut off every night helps me and my family get to sleep on time.
This is what I suspect as well. Having been a teen, it seems very likely that a later start time wouldn't help some people who would just stay up later. Now maybe not as many people would do that, but then the issue is more that they just need to turn off the lights and go to sleep earlier.
With great power comes create responsibility. Artificial light is a powerful thing when it comes to messing with natural sleep rhythms.
Well, the biological rhythm can be impacted by much more than just late-night activities. I'm not talking about short term things like jet lag. I'm thinking more chronic things like insomnia, chronic illness/malnutrition, emotional trauma, etc all come to mind. So it would be unfair to place all the blame on students playing WoW or partying instead of studying, for example.
I don't doubt that the findings are the case, I've experienced it myself and seen it in plenty others. What I would've liked to see in the paper, though, is more proof of the cause-and-effect relationship's weight here: do people who naturally stay up late get worse grades, or do people who get worse grades end up with worse sleep habits?
I'd guess there's some degree of both, but without the study being more longitudinal (eg, tracking the same population across their entire time in college to see how their grades and sleep habits relate) it's hard to say. Purely anecdotally, I've seen people who start struggling (for reasons that have nothing to do with sleep) drift into a depressive/withdrawn existence that includes insomnia and sleeping late.
There are tons of lab experiments showing people's ability to learn goes down when they're sleep deprived. Memory consolidation seems to be one of the principle reasons sleep and given all the in-lab double blind studies it would be amazing if people getting less sleep didn't do worse in school. Which isn't to say that this particular paper or article proves that.
> There are tons of lab experiments showing people's ability to learn goes down when they're sleep deprived.
I get that, but instead of immediately jumping to sleeping later maybe we should look at why kids appear to be going to bed later. All of the devices and distractions have likely pushed people to stay up later and later. Maybe the fix is not to move school times, but have parents take devices away at a reasonable time.
Generally speaking young children will tend to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier than their parents and adolescents will go to bed later and wake up later. It's true that electric lights and computer screens have exacerbated the problem of teenagers wanting to sleep in but they didn't cause them in the first place.
Looking at the chart in the middle of the article brings up more questions than it answers. Maybe it's the weird 3D perspective, but it looks like all groups get better grades in evening classes. Furthermore, it looks like finches do better in all categories than larks, and owls always do the worst. This seems to argue against the points that the article puts forth.
I’ve found these recent studies interesting in that they seem to confirm what many young people have been saying for a long time. I’ve always struggled to wake myself up of a morning and found that most classes earlier than about 10am were pretty much forgotten come end of semester. Not sure how American schools organise timetables but the two weekly cycle of class times went some way to compensate for this by changing which class was first meaning you wouldn’t fall drastically behind in one specifically because it was earliest. Things have of course changed since leaving school and my sleep patterns have changed significantly, and I can see immediately how trying to make a school student conform to such a cycle would be a poor idea, but I wonder if some time soon I’ll forget being young and start seeing the world like so many leaders seem to with no regard at all for what it was like growing up.
> It may be time to tailor students’ class schedules to their natural biological rhythms...
Why does everybody want to change the world around them and not just adapt themselves to the world, e.g.:
'To earn better grades, students should sync their biological rhythm to their class schedules.'
While some might argue that it is not easy to do that, I would respond that such skill is invaluable for your life ahead. Granted, not every job requires such a skill, but many do.
From my own experience, I can tell that exercising discipline to go to bed early paid off for my work experience and there are few things I hate more than being tired at work: While work hours wear on, you are not getting done anything either.
Conversely, I've suffered through being a night owl with 6am and 7am shifts for years by trying to force myself to bed early. I've tried it all: meditation, exercise, melatonin, sleeping pills, etc etc. I'm just not wired to be a morning person.
So I gave up and asked if I could start coming in at 9am instead. Never felt better.
Because the body has a cycle of hormone release that makes people alert or tired at different times and trying to change it is almost impossible. There is a theory that we evolved different sleep schedules so that one member of a tribe would be awake at any point in time to be alert to danger. This is not a question of mere will or discipline. You try staying awake until 7am every night and see how it feels.
Then humans must be different in that respect. In fact, I changed my sleep schedules multiple times in the last two years alone (from getting up at 6am to going to bed at 6am). The only constant seems to be that I require 8 hours of sleep. For a few days I can get by with 6 hours, but after a week or so with less than 8 hours I get kinda sick for as long as I don't catch up.
However, while I feel that my body has some kind of cycle too, for me it is possible to adjust it over the course of a few weeks.
Night shift workers die younger than people whose shift rotates die younger than people who work a day shift.
And one way people acclimate to different sleep schedules is by forgetting what not feeling like shit feels like. People do not acclimate to commuting, they forget what not feeling terrible all the time feels like.
Well, I think there are more factors to earlier dying night shift workers than just their sleep cycle. To name a few:
- less sunlight (vitamin D)
- lower payment
- lower education
Those might all affect the life expectancy and if night shift workers die earlier than those with rotating shifts, it is obviously a sign that not the change is the main factor for the lower life expectancy.
From my own experience I can tell you, that I neither forgot what feeling like shit feels nor was I forced to change my sleep cycles by some exterior factors. I agree to some extend with your examples, but I don't think those are the only options to acclimate to different sleep schedules.
I like how it shows that getting up early ruins the whole day.
I have to come an hour early for a meeting every other week and it's always a challenging day...
Getting up ~9am is the point at which it doesn't effect my performance anymore (I'd still prefer shifting my sleep phase even further). Sadly this only worked for a job once in my career.
I get up early and have since High School. All I do is make sure I go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Going to work, lunch, home early is friggin awesome. Avoiding rush hour, saving me roughly 1 hour a day in traffic, is fantastic. Plus it gives me time to do any personal things in the early afternoon without affecting my work schedule.
This is exactly the kind of thing people with delayed sleep cycles hear all the time. There is a group of people for which your solution is impossible. Your circadian rhythm is compatible with that kind of schedule, and that's great. Some other people can't do that. I mean, I can wake up early regularly but eventually get into a sort of perpetual feeling just like jet-lag with symptoms of sleep deprivation (even when going to bed earlier and falling asleep early due to exhaustion).
It was actually funny, after one of my recent trips to Europe from Australia, when I came back my (actual) jet lag weirdly landed me in a sort of normal cycle for a week and a bit. It was truely a bizarre experience - I literally cannot remember a time in my life (I'm almost 30) where I could regularly wake up before 9am and being able to go to sleep before 12:30 to 1:30 am and feel normal. But for this little while I was waking up between 7:30-8:30am and going to sleep between 10pm and 11pm. It quickly wore off (discipline doesn't have anything to do with it, you just can't fight your physiology) but it was really interesting and eye-opening experience...
I'm the same way. I've had a couple times in my life where things lined up with the rest of the world. Waking up in the 6 to 7am range and going to sleep before midnight. It was interesting to live on a "normal" schedule for a while. And also very convenient--normally all appointments happen happen after noon which halves the available window right off the bat. But my schedule always slides to my natural rhythm.
For me, either I can’t fall asleep earlier no matter how good ‘sleep hygiene’ I have, how little screen time before bed, how long I avoid caffeine for, etc. or if I do fall asleep earlier because I’m exhausted I seem to get lower quality sleep and it gets harder and harder to wake up on time.
For me, it’s absolutely not a conscious choice, and it hasn’t changed depending on the level of stress I’ve been under, and I’ve tried all sorts of things across living in three different places over the years...
I eventually found sleep science research that suggests that it is just extremely difficult to go against your natural circadian rhythm. I guess the problem for delayed people (and if I recall the statistics correctly, the severity of my sleep cycle delay is such that it only affects something like 2-5% of adults, but I think more than 10 or 20 percent of adolescents) is that anyone can be lazy and sleep in, but it’s far, far harder to go the other way - so the majority of the population with a normal or early cycle can just go to bed earlier and function normally waking up earlier, but it doesn’t work for everyone.
It’s their bodies’ reaction to sunlight. There are plenty of nocturnal animals and plenty of diurnal ones. They don’t have clocks or screens to know when to wake and when to sleep. Neither did we until very recently.
As I grew into the role of a young adult, I experimented and arranged school and/of work to be later in the day. Why not, especially as a “lazy” student, right? Funny enough, the quality of my work increased and I got better grades. I thought more critically in class and clearly when on the job. I didn’t need caffeine to function when I awoke or have to manage screen time before bed. I became a more productive person like the early birds, but in my own fashion.
It can be hard to read comments like this that paint the picture as learned helplessness, especially when it feels like honestly playing to one’s strengths.
Yea, that's the "compatibility mode" I'm running on: strictly going to bed at 11pm. I sadly really miss the nights and have to force myself to do this daily.
Here in europe daylight saving time just ended, now I have go to bed an hour earlier from one day to another. It took me out for 4 days (really bad performance) and the first 2 days I stayed awake in bed so long I became more awake again before managing to fall asleep.
I go to bed between 8-9pm, rarely as late as 10pm.
Going to bed means I'm reading a book (physical, not digital) and winding myself down from the day.
I find exercising during the day helps immeasurably when trying to go to sleep at a reasonable hour (based on your own schedule). Also limiting caffeine after lunch.
To people that say it's impossible, maybe it is. I did have a late schedule for a few years in college (waiting tables until close). I still scheduled my classes for 9/10am at the latest starting time though. Maybe my working out when I get up helps as well. Plus personal discipline (both going to bed and getting up regularly).
I get 8-9 hours of sleep every night outside of rare exceptions. My mom said I've been this way since childhood. I would never give up sleep to stay up late, unless absolutely necessary.
My high school buddies would give me hell during the week, but I got up at 5:30am for my early bird weightlifting every day. So 9pm was "late" for me.
What actually worked for me, but I can't do it with my current job: bi-phasic sleep.
I did this while in school, I slept 2am-7am and 4-6:30pm. Pro: you learn to fall in to deep sleep very quickly and I would often have lucid dreams and you can get away with slightly less sleep. Con: if anything gets in the way of the afternoon sleep phase it feels like missing half a nights sleep...
Physical exertion plays a role - but when I'm rested (~8 hours of sleep) I usually don't get really tired until I've been up 18-20 hours.
I've worked with friends that are completely different, and struggle to keep their eyes open after midnight. So there's definitely big differences.
I do generally manage to function well on "average" of ~8 hours of sleep every 24 hours: some night 8,9 or 10 some 4 or 5.
But yeah, if you're one of the people that can't understand how "changing the rhythm" can be a problem: try starting tour day at 0230 or 0300 am for a couple of weeks.
For the vast majority, that is though (hence attack right before dawn...).
To add to that - cut out screens at a specified time. 8PM, 9PM, whatever makes sense an hour or two hours before going to bed. It has a drastic effect on sleepiness.
I love how I had to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the actual, practical solution. I’ve had to move farther and farther away form work over the years to the point where I need to wake up before 6AM to get to work on time. So I just go to bed earlier. Problem solved. Start going to bed at 8PM. Give it a try for a week and report back whether you have an easier time in the mornings.
Misalignments between endogenous circadian rhythms and the built environment (i.e., social jet lag, SJL) result in learning and attention deficits. Currently, there is no way to assess the impact of SJL on learning outcomes of large populations as a response to schedule choices, let alone to assess which individuals are most negatively impacted by these choices. We analyzed two years of learning management system login events for 14,894 Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) students to investigate the capacity of such systems as tools for mapping the impact of SJL over large populations while maintaining the ability to generate insights about individuals. Personal daily activity profiles were validated against known biological timing effects, and revealed a majority of students experience more than 30 minutes of SJL on average, with greater amplitude correlating strongly with a significant decrease in academic performance, especially in people with later apparent chronotypes. Our findings demonstrate that online records can be used to map individual- and population-level SJL, allow deep mining for patterns across demographics, and could guide schedule choices in an effort to minimize SJL’s negative impact on learning outcomes.
Isn’t your chronotype fairly mutable though? With some dedication and a couple weeks you can adjust to waking up whenever. Especially at college age.
Obviously lifestyle could be limiting if you’re trying to start waking up at 6am, but if you’re optimizing for GPA, then you’re gonna have to make lifestyle sacrifices anyway
That's only somewhat true. If you're exposed to sunlight during the day, much brighter than a lit room, it will tend to have an influence on your circadian rhythm. You might be able to sleep at arbitrary offsets but the quality of your sleep will suffer. Though wearing sunglasses when outside during the morning will help you get to sleep later and wearing them outside during the afternoon will help you sleep earlier. And I'm not aware of research showing a problem with shifting your sleep to arbitrary offsets if you're never exposed to sunlight, though that might have other bad effects.
If you are willing to use window blackout blinds and sunlamps on timers then it's not that hard. However, in collage with a roommate that's not necessarily possible.
In practice, it's just a little slightly harder than you say, when you have a roommate who shuts the blinds every morning and keeps a white desk light on at night.
Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Favor After School Football Practice.
Seriously, much of America is so entranced by high school football that entire district schedules are oriented around ensuring ample practice time after school.
It determines bus schedules and school start times for the entire district and all students.
The article doesn't support that, it doesn't make sense for a vast majority of school districts - especially inner city ones.
Another commenter made more sense - early class times give parents time before work to prepare their kids for school. This football angle is ridiculous. If it were true, wouldn't colleges and universities suffer from the same standard?
You'll find case after case of local newspapers reporting on school board meetings where requests to move the start time were met with fierce opposition by athletic directors, etc.
Both my parents were educators (my mom ran special education for a school district, my father ended his career as Dean of the School of Ed @ Edinboro) and for a time I ran the countries top education blog. All three of us encountered this obstacle to sensible school scheduling across a variety of different schools and districts.
I'd say it's the leading obstacle that I've seen when you look at local district opposition.
I am more than half way through the book "Why we sleep?" by Matthew Walker and it is not a surprise to me that misalignment of circadian rhythm with class schedules results in poor grades. The book goes into great detail on the importance of getting eight hours of sleep on a regular schedule. Getting less than eight hours of sleep is tied to every imaginable disease and poor memory. I highly recommend reading the book.
In my experience at Intel where people were reprimanded if they weren't in the office before 8 AM I also saw bad code tied to times that didn't match the developer's biological clock :-).
Unfortunately, the summary on this issue appears to be "nobody cares". Including the parents themselves. Teenagers do not really have rights so it's going to be very hard to change this.
I wonder if the study corrects for students that just stay up late for parties, etc., and just strip themselves of sleep when it could be avoided. It's quite easy to move your bioclock forward bit by bit, esp.for social reasons. It is very hard to roll it back (some studies suggest it's better to just roll it forward more and more instead)
The problem in college is bad, but the problem is some high schools is even worse. At high schools without block scheduling, every day might be a 6 am alarm to get to school by 7:00.
Block scheduling was absolutely amazing, and I'm so glad I had access to it. My school did "modified block" with skinny classes (40 minutes) and blocks (85 minute). The only skinny classes were math, music, and foreign language, all of which seem to have a big benefit from going the full year. The concept of trying to do a chemistry or physics lab in 40 minutes sounded awful.
My high school ran from 8:45-3:10. Morning activities were typically 7-8 or 8:15, so you could still drop by teachers classrooms before school started.
Lewis Black [1] made this observation (with less diplomatic language) back in 2004:
... I flunked that course. It's not my fault.
They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning.
And there is absolutely nothing that you can
learn out of one bloodshot eye. After I flunked
the first two tests, I grabbed the professor
by the throat and I said, "Why are you
teaching this **** at this ungodly hour?
Are you *trying* to keep this stuff a secret?"
Sure. Mine, and I think many others, changed precisely when I went through puberty. Early riser before, late riser after and ever since.
My grades (predictably) crashed early in high school, didn't start to recover until I discovered coffee. But that couldn't be found in my Utah high school, of course, so I either had to sneak a cup in or find someplace to "joe up" during lunch.
Additionally, six years ago I moved into an apartment with a huge east-facing window. Now I'm a natural morning person again — during the summer months.
It's all about the industrial complex design, during the industrial revolution. Kids are supposed to sit in rows, show up to school on time, so they can fit in easily in the factories when they come of age. Also since child labor, was abolished, that means parents who work at factories have to drop their kids of at 0745 School time, so they can catch the buggy / walk to the factory. Once you take the work element, out you'll notice no kids needs to spend 8-10 hours at school.
But now since our 'work' is no longer mechanical but more 'conceptual' we've to make school only places to socialize.
Is there some other correlation between owls and being owls that's excluded from this study? Do they tend to use drugs or alcohol more? Do they tend to date more? Do they tend to watch more television? Play video games more late at night?
This is an interesting study that doesn't necessarily suggest later class times will fix the issue but this could be a bit of a "wicked problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
I am a night owl, and I have found that this has carried over into my adult life as well. Jobs, where butts in seats at an early hour are required or even just strongly encouraged, have presented problems for me.
It was shown long ago that your brain doesn't fully wake up anyways until something like 10 AM I believe, if not more like 11 AM or noon. Having students get to school at 6-8 AM is just wasting resources. As some have pointed out though, this runs much deeper than people give credit for. The 8-4 schedule of schools isn't due to random choice, it's built around the entire country from the ground up operating on that type of schedule. People need a system where kids can get sent off to school in a way that doesn't impact adults getting to and from work. If schools started even an hour later, I'd bet at least a few million parents would face hardships in adjusting to get their kids to school and maintain their current job.
Of course there are more efficient times that we could use for school, but they would break the fragile system the US already has in place.
Block scheduling has alleviated the knowledge loss to an extent(imo). By changing from the full 7-8 classes per day schedule to 3-4 classes every day, students can retain more information because they are in each class longer. That also means your homework schedule is drastically less stressful.
I don't see any major changes coming to school times. The issue needs to be discussed, but what really can be done about it?
Might go a little ways toward explaining how I got a D the grading period integrals were introduced in my 7:30am AP Calc class, yet still ended up as a physics PhD.
This is nothing new. The problem is that it won't change - many people, when asked about education, seem to be of the opinion that if they could endure the hardships in their youth (getting up way too early, walking sometimes one to two hours to school, cruel teachers, corporal punishment - yes this is a thing, even in the USA it's still legal in many places -, "physical education" aka "survival of the fittest") then their children should suffer the same fate.
In addition (though this is Germany-specific) the "elite" of society (which were in the Gymnasium and send their kids there too) will resist fiercely any movement to a more equal system which does not separate children onto fixed tracks so that their privileges are not being cut (or watered down, when it comes to laxer admission criteria for Gymnasien).
Parents, especially concerned and wealthy ones, are a powerful group of voters. Ideally education should be taken away from political influence entirely and given into the hands of actual experts...
I was a miserable high school student. Both miserable in feeling, and my grades were atrocious.
School started just after seven AM, and I never slept more than 4 hours. The only time the phone line was available for me to use my modem was at night so I preferred using my computer over getting good grades.
It took me a while to get to university but when I did I ended up an excellent GPA. Classes never started before 9, go figure.
I’m a Bay Area high school student and schools in this area have tried adopting these late start times. However, they were faced with intense community resistance, with parents pushing against that idea as it interferes with extracurriculars and childcare.
I recently watched a PBS Frontline documentary back from 2002 that discussed this issue, and even then parents were extremely resistant to change.
I used to be a typical 'owl' as a student and when I worked in research. My peak performance hour were from 10pm to 4am. When you get kids and an 'industry' job, that isn't an option. It took me about 7 years to switch. Now I'm a true morning person. Best hours are now from 6am to 2pm. Afternoons are horror though. I can barely stay awake 2pm - 5pm.
It happens naturally as you get older. There’s nothing you can do to hasten the transition. Regular exercise helps with sleep but if you stop the effects on sleep end.
Do we like to tell ourselves the purpose of school is academics or athletics?
If athletics, school must start as early as possible, so "away" outdoor games can be held outside in sunlight and "away" teams can get home at a reasonable hour.
If academics, school should start as late as possible, so students (and instructors!) can do class prep immediately before class and/or sleep in.
Its interesting that the only acceptable model of alternative education is essentially "pick your major in high school" such that there are art high schools or music high schools or aviation high schools, etc. And of course religious schools that have been around for centuries. However there are no business model schools based on priority, like a school with no athletics program that focuses on academics.
The real purpose of school is lowering unemployment by increasing babysitting years, along with raising the bar as a filter to reduce the number of "successful" kids needing jobs. Certainly we have far too much academics for our economy and culture to hold them.
From my school (an affluent top tier high school), the athletics department did have a larger say than academics.
I think it had more to do with how loud and how much energy athletics had towards getting their way (and the parents reeeally cared about football. This was hardcore SEC territory), vs how much spare time the teachers had. I don't think it was explicitly pro athletics vs academics, but it certainly was systemically.
I really dont want to be a fodder for the military? Would it not make more sense to concentrate on problems that are now as opposed to possibles? The current place of athletics in the school system really fucks things up.
I recall my high school days were absolutely awful, I could never wake up properly in the morning and I zombie-made coffee and then zombie-walked to school.
Right now, if I need to wake up at 6 AM, for one, it's much easier to just shift my schedule, and for another, even if I don't get as many hours of sleep it just doesn't hit me all that hard.
And I think people judge teenagers off of the adult scale, which is completely off...
I can definitely confirm this from my time in college at least. I had an 8am, 4 day a week calculus class my first semester that I was only taking to get an easy A since I already had the AP credit. Ended up dropping it and my grades in every other class improved.
My best semester by far was one in which I somehow managed to schedule all of my classes after 2pm until about 9pm.
That's what I loved most about my college/university: no mandatory attendance.
Could wake up when I wanted, and start studying at a more suitable time.
I also have a hard time following multiple lectures during the same day. So a nice additional effect was that I, instead of attending, would study more efficiently in my own way.
As a college student that doesn't get to pick what times he can take classes, let alone pick any of them myself. I am dumbfounded by the amount of people who think that an 8AM class is out of the ordinary. I've got 4 out of 5 days where I have classes at 8:15AM.
Great study, really interesting. I'd like to see a follow-up study with the following design:
Find high schools with rotating class schedules (i.e. math is at a different time of day each day for 6 days, then loop that), then find high schools with fixed schedules (i.e. math is always first period for some students). Then, compare performance of night owls in the two different schools. Theoretically, if the authors' study is generalizable from college to HS, then the night-owls should do significantly worse in the early AM classes in the non-rotating school, and significantly better in the early PM classes in the non-rotating school.
I was never able to hold a 9-5 job. I could manage a year, but during that year I was just physically and mentally exhausted. I just cannot wake up earlier than 8 and at the same time I am unable to get to sleep earlier than 10. In the morning I was asleep and feeling productive in the evening when I was commuting back home. My performance was really bad and employer didn't think I am a good worker. My only choice was to go freelancing where I can adapt work to my waking hours.
I think it should be illegal for employers to force 9-5.
It's frustrating that we let antiquated systems remain in the face of new data indicating that the system could be improved. I don't think it's ANYONE's goal to let some people get worse grades just because. Generally, the goal of schooling is to get everyone to a better, more knowledgeable version of themselves in preparation for the world.
> Generally, the goal of schooling is to get everyone to a better, more knowledgeable version of themselves in preparation for the world.
Call me cynical, but I seriously doubt that this is the actual goal of schooling for pretty much anyone. The real purpose of school seems to be a) to get rid of kids so they're not muddling about in early hours; b) to generate a hierarchy of kids so we can figure out who to put in the lower castes.
Yoga and Ancient Indian technology has already talked about BrahmaMuhurtha, which is the apt time for meditation and thus time to practice any skill required. BrahmaMuhurtha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmamuhurtha).
I would be careful about concluding that women and men have different biological clocks from this observation. I feel like society strongly discourages women from staying up late (constantly telling them it is unsafe / will make them ugly / suggests they are sexually active).
Unlike those of us in STEM most high schoolers or college students don't end up using anything they fail to remember because they're only getting 6 hour of sleep a night. I'm a lot more concerned with the link between poor sleep and poor mental health.
I am fresh early. The point is that this is on a school level not individual so I think the performance of my sons school is pretty important example of the the report probably not being very conclusive.
Question here is, is it really that hard to go from night owl to morning lark or daytime finch...? I have done this myself just by adjusting my sleep schedule.
Perhaps in classes where the grade is determined by parroting back what the professor says in class. It’s when (and how much) you study, not when class is that counts. Class just tells you what’s important to study.
If your day is ruined because you had to wake up at incompatible hour, you won't be able to learn much during that day, regardless if it is in class or in the evening at home as you'll be feeling fatigued.
This discussion is so old. Everybody knows that class schedules begin too early for kids. It's the teachers that keep later schedules from happening because they want their free time afterwards.
I've been getting up at 4am since I started high school and am at my peak alertness 5am - 7am. Based on the comments I'm seeing here, would that suggest that I am in a small minority among tech workers?
At the same time, the point of college for most kids is to prepare them for a white collar job. If there's a huge client meeting at 10am and there's still 3 hours of preparation to do before they arrive, no one's going to be very sympathetic to the excuse that you have "social jet lag." Expecting college adults to get out of bed before 10 is hardly a substantial burden.
If it's Monday afternoon, you know you have a big meeting at 10AM Tuesday, you know you have 3 hours more of prep to do, and you know you're ineffective in the early morning, why not work later to cover that prep? This sounds like a procrastination problem more than a night owl problem.
Except there's no reason to prepare anything here because the problem is biological. It's simply easier to wake up early as an adult. Just like many others things are easier for physical reasons that society keeps trying to "teach".
Adolescence is not permanent. Adolescents require significantly more sleep than any other age group, so the jet lag would be substantially reduced for adults.
The real question here is, why do Americans still start working so early? I mean, that's so XX century. I come to office at noon at all four of jobs that I have/had.
Come to think of it, maybe it's weather-dependent.
This really depends on the firm. If important aspects of the business take place early, then sure you have to be there early. If not, you might have to be there early anyway because reasons, but then again you might not.
what about shift workers that work at night. Lots of evidence that their health is damaged because they are forced to live off cycle with their normal sleep patterns.
This just sounds like more excuses. I know plenty of people who got to class at 7:30 AM on the dot and excelled with straight A's. I never had a problem. So what's different?
Some kids can do it. Some go to sleep earlier and wake up refreshed. Some don't, it's biological that's all. I wish I'd gone to bed earlier in high school but I was wired to stay up late. Same in college. It wasn't until I started working that I got to bed earlier. And after having kids man I can go to bed at 8pm easy.
Sleep patterns change throughout life. (Think infants, toddlers, young adults, middle-aged, elderly). The sleep pattern of a given teenager is not necessarily the same as the one they'll have even a few years latter, no external rewiring required.
Wow, our society loves to blame our problems on other people and "the system".
"Social jetlag correlates to GPA". Hmm, maybe the students who prioritized school and didn't go out drinking every night ended up doing better.
You don't "deserve" good grades just because you're smart. Work hard for it. Get up early. Go to bed. Prioritize. Give something up. That's how life works.
Maybe if we recognize biological differences and structure society to align with that diversity we will get better performance out of everyone. I think it’s kind of insane that we all cram onto roads at the exact time so we can get to the office at the exact time. Why not have staggered schedules; especially if that means better performance from more people.
I totally agree with what you said. We need more personalized education systems. But this article is a red herring. If you actually read the data and figures from the article, the conclusions have been twisted to create clickbait. In particular, the article talks about persistent INSTABILITY of sleeping schedules. "We quantified SJL as the difference between the average phase of activity on class days and non-class days." This has nothing to do with the disadvantage of night owls to non-night owls, but rather talks about the disadvantage of folks who oscillate their sleeping schedule from day to day. It doesn't matter if you're a night owl or not, that's going to kill anyone's productivity. The audience read what they wanted to read, and interpreted this as "night owls vs. early birds".
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I think people experience sleep pattern oscillation when they are trying to live on the wrong schedule. Night owls end up with a non-24hr sleep pattern when they try to live off cycle for too long. I experienced that myself when I was a lawyer in New York.
As a "night owl" having trouble to adjust to schedules imposed by "early birds" I find your comment offensive. I don't drink alcohol nor take drugs and didn't go to parties because I found it mostly a waste of time. I worked hard, but it is impossible to be good, when you are constantly sleep deprived.
I'm a night owl too. I dealt with it. It wasn't easy - you have to be disciplined with sleeping schedules. I have to work out every morning to push my body awake. I have to eat right. I have to get regulation lights and blockout curtains and earplugs and meditate before sleep. Good things have never been easy.
You see this is a struggle - you either keep up working against your body or you are out. People who are not night owls don't have to do all that. I don't think you should dedicate your life to keep sleep schedule that is not compatible with your body - this is a dead end and recipe for depression to say the least. Instead of making living a chore I decided to accept my situation and adapt - that means I now do freelancing and I am able to set my work hours as I see fit. I have never been happier, but that means I am unable to undertake "normal" work anymore.
But it wasn't until my first kid that I finally understood that school doesn't start this early because it's good for the learning experience.
It starts this early so parents can get their kids to school and start working afterwards, without getting fired.