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Schools Are Slow to Learn That Sleep Deprivation Hits Teenagers Hardest

331 points by hvo 11y ago

jschwartzi 11y ago
My high school started at 730 am. They always gave bus scheduling as the reason they couldn't have a later start. Basically, the district only had so many buses to allocate for pick-ups, and would stagger start times to make sure the bus count was minimized.
- reustle 11y ago
  I mean, it is a valid reason. My small town (4k~ people) did the same, high school started at 7:45am and each bus had both a high school / middle school route, and immediately after an elementary school route. Not only would you need twice as many busses, you'd need twice as many drivers. The cost difference is massive. That said, that doesn't mean they can't bump the start time of all the schools up an hour or two.
  - saulrh 11y ago
    There's an even easier solution to that: IIRC elementary school kids are way more resistant to sleep deprivation than teenagers, so you can just flip the schedules around and start elementary school kids before teenagers. Downside is probably then that the more-demanding elementary school kids get home earlier, but I think they're already getting home well before the working parent does.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - dripton 11y ago
      Our school system does this. I haven't heard any complaints about it. (And we have a lot of entitled parents who complain about everything else.) I'm surprised that more schools aren't switching.
    - jacalata 11y ago
      I've heard that the reason this isn't the default is that parents get far more upset about making an elementary school kid get up and wait for a bus in the dark than a teenager.
      - Pingviini 11y ago
        Makes sense too, America is way too dangerous to have kids wait for buses in the dark. No doubt they would be kidnapped almost immediately.
        monocasa 11y ago
        Can't tell if sarcastic or not.
        saulrh 11y ago
        Poe's Law strikes again.
        jacalata 11y ago
        I understand the arguments are made about the danger of standing next to a road invisibly (especially in shitty places with no sidewalks) but I'm sure some people are worried about kidnapping!
        ams6110 11y ago
        Heard that argument here when the idea was discussed. The funny thing is that these days (at least for Elementary school) there's always a parent or two who walks their kid to the bus stop and waits with them until the bus comes.
- ACow_Adonis 11y ago
  "...but then, if that was true, couldn't we be scheduling half of the starts later in the day in order to stagger out the demand for buses even more optimally?" As you can probably tell, I was not a popular child with teachers/authority in my high school days :P
carsongross 11y ago
It is absolutely ridiculous that we make growing humans get out of bed before 8 AM. Pubescent teens should be sleeping 10 hours a night, particularly boys who are in their growth spurts. When I am emperor dictator, no schools open before 9AM.
- reustle 11y ago
  But, then people will just stay up later. I know that's what I did as I went through schools / jobs. My last job I could get there around 1030am (wake at 9:45~) so I would make sure to get to bed around 2am.
  - journeeman 11y ago
    I agree. I used to make the same mistake. Until I realised that it is best to go back to how people slept before electric light was invented; i.e. it is best to align your sleep cycle with the Sun's movement. Of course, maybe it's harder to do this nearer the poles but, in the tropics we get near equal hours of day and night. I have found sleeping early and staying away from modern tech 30-45 mins. before sleep to be _immensely_ beneficial.
    - fpoling 11y ago
      Even at 60 latitude it is still possible to wake up durung winter if not after sunrise but at least at dawn if one can afford to wake up at 8:00. For a while I had to wake before 6:00 and it really sucked at winter when sunrise here is after 9:00. This has little to do with the amount of sleeping. To my surprise I managed to switch to going to bed before 10pm. It is precisely waking up in the dark that was problematic.
  - madengr 11y ago
    Ditto here in grad school. Coincidence though the pub closed at 1 am.
  - bendykstra 11y ago
    Your personal experience doesn't comport with the findings of sleep researchers. Later work or school start times correlate with increased sleep. This is due to biological influences on behavior (people feel tired at night and go to bed.) To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at 6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?
cesarbs 11y ago
Going a bit off topic here (since my kid is still in elementary), but I wish schools started later for more selfish reasons. Our kid naturally wakes up early but the Mrs. and I are night owls. We've been miserable since our kid started going to school. We've been trying to force ourselves to go to bed earlier than its natural to us, with varying degrees of success, but most weeks are spent half asleep most of the time because waking up at 7am just doesn't work for us. I can't wait for middle school when the kiddo will likely be old enough to wake up on her own, fix herself up and go catch the school bus.
- Evenjos 11y ago
  My parents were night owls, and so was I. Waking up before dawn was a nightmarish hell for me, all through junior high and high school.
  - ihsw 11y ago
    I am, and mine is 7 years old. I have noticed a change in his morning routine that seems irreversible. Previously he woke around 5am, but now it is after 7am every day. As someone that is definitely not a morning person, I think I am starting to rub off.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    Likewise for me. Upon starting college (and getting rid of morning classes), I found I slept better (and longer), had less migraines, and retained information better with less effort.
  - trill1 11y ago
    Same here. I surfed the internet and played computer games until 1 or 2 AM every night, and then spent a lot of time in junior high and high school nodding out in class. I really learned almost nothing, which isn't the fault of my teachers or anyone else. I would have been better off in a radically less structured educational environment, something as simple as being put in a room alone with some books and an offline computer for 4 hours a day, with long breaks in between to exercise and socialize.
- 11y ago
sgentle 11y ago
I predict this will be a difficult sell, for the reasons pg outlined in "Why Nerds are Unpopular" (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html): > Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend. Schools are government-subsidised daycare first, educational institutions second, which is the reason they often fail at teaching students but rarely fail at keeping them in place. From that perspective, why would you change a child's school hours to anything less compatible with their parents' work hours? If anything, I would expect the trend to be towards longer hours at school, perhaps by more tightly integrating after-school activities.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  So start actual classes later, then kids/parents can decide if the parent's poor scheduling should impact the child.
  - peter_mcrae 11y ago
    Having a job (which provides for your children) that requires you to be at work at a certain time is poor scheduling?
    - terinjokes 11y ago
      If classes ending at 3 happened across an entire area, I'm sure the high school jobs would move to accommodate. My 11th and 12th years happened in 2008/2009 so good luck having a job as a high schooler.
      - monocasa 11y ago
        He was talking about the parents' jobs.
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      Why wouldn't it be? It might be necessary but it's still a bad thing.
honua 11y ago
Why did you bother having a child then? Really? You're excited until they wake up by themselves, get ready and go away? So what's the point of their life and yours intersecting? A few minutes after school to say 'hey' before they go off to do homework and sleep? I appreciate that not everyone can do this, but my wife and I home school our daughter, and one of the very things we talk about is that we're glad we don't have to wake up earlier than our bodies need to get the child somewhere. That's not the main reason we home school, but it's a nice benefit. Edit: I meant to add that the main reason we home school is to get to spend the most amount of time with her as we can. It's such a precious time and I wouldn't want to see her gone most of the day.
- austinjp 11y ago
  I think that's harsh, smacks of competitive parentism, and dismisses the value of sleep. You can love your children but struggle with aspects of their behaviour, and you certainly can't predict what they're going to be longer before they've been born. Every parent I know loves their children and is delighted with them, but they leap at any opportunity to spend time without them. A night out with adult friends while the kids sleep at the grandparents' is a luxury to be seized. Not quite what the previous poster was getting at, just another data point in the complex relationship between parent and child.
- dang 11y ago
  > Why did you bother having a child then? Really? This is unduly personal and not in the spirit of civility which is supposed to govern this site. In fact it's a downright nasty response to cesarbs's perfectly cordial comment. Please don't post like this. If you'd left (or edited) out the first paragraph, the comment would have made your point without putting someone else down. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410231 and marked it off-topic.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    By the way, @dang, is there a specific amount of karma after which I can post comments more often? Most of the time I get questions as comments to my comments, and can’t answer them because of "You are submitting too fast". So I type my answer to that comment, leave the browser tab open, and wait an hour to submit it. This obviously makes discussion with others quite problematic, and I’ve even thought about starting a second account just to be able to answer other comments with less than a few hours delay. (Ironically, this comment was also posted in a similar way: I wrote it 2 hours before posting, but had to wait again and again for the "You are submitting too fast" to end).
sullstice 11y ago
I think when it comes to schools and large institutions like universities, their term should be: "Too big to succeed" We need education to be able to change fast and adapt. Something we clearly cannot get with these large institutions.
adamnemecek 11y ago
Let's not even talk about the fact that educational system is extremely inefficient and is prone to wasting student's time. One would think that after spending 6-8 hours a day for 12 years that you'd come out somewhat knowledgeable about something.
- meric 11y ago
  Having moved into an English speaking country at 9, school helped me become fluent in English. I also attribute my arithmetic skills to my schooling, the calculus knowledge immediately put to use in the computer game I was writing. I also more or less enjoyed my history lessons. It helped me better immerse in Age of Empires at night.
  - adamnemecek 11y ago
    Inefficient isn't the same a absolutely useless.
    - meric 11y ago
      'Somewhat knowledgeable about something'. I think I would qualify...
- kuschku 11y ago
  You are if you come out of high school. You understand the global history since the neolithical times rougly, and your own contintents history since the 1500s pretty exactly. You understand how algebra, analysis, stochastic work, and can do simple mathematical proofs. You know the laws of physics, how and why things work, you have learnt general and special relativity, and even know parts of quantum mechanics, including being able to work with the probability functions of electrons. You know basic chemistry, understand what each element is, know a large part of organic and inorganic chemistry, have experimented with it, and can explain why some molecular bindings work, and why some don’t. You speak fluently 3 to 4 languages, and can read standard literature in them, as well as being able to write essays about cultural topics in them. You have had PE, know how to play a majority of sports, and have a physical condition where you are able to play them. You know the historical styles of art produced, and when and where they were produced, and have experience working in a majority of styles yourself. You know how our political system and our economy works, and know how to do accounting and taxes for yourself. You know how to start a company, and the trade offs of different types of incorporation. You are able to work in teams, can delegate work, know how to learn things from existing sources and do your own research, how to write scientific papers, can debate with others in a civil way. ________________________ Excerpted and translated from the curriculum for high school students in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, 2012. (And I can attest that what I learnt in school fits this description)
nod 11y ago
Seattle Public Schools, for one, has taken this to heart and rearranged the schedule for next year. Elementaries now get the early starts, and the high schools will start at 9:35 AM.
clevernickname 11y ago
about fucking time common sense caught up with academia
YZF 11y ago
My 16 year old home-schooled daughter wakes up at noon... By the way, where I went to school we had 7am (!!!) classes ... I used to sleep in and just skip them as a teen ;) My personal schedule as an adult is to start working around 10am. Oddly enough when I am on vacation I tend to trend towards getting up earlier. If I need to get to work early for a meeting e.g. I tend to feel very tired the entire day. I think some lot of this is related to how our sleep patterns are screwed up by artificial lighting. When we go camping we generally don't have fires and we go to sleep when the sun sets down and get up when it comes up. It all feels very natural after you've done a few days of that...
- peferron 11y ago
  Try camping one full year in Ireland (beautiful country) and see how natural it feels to sleep 7 hrs in summer and 17 hrs in winter. And Ireland isn't even that far north.
wolfgke 11y ago
Let's assume that everybody has his own natural sleeping schedule (so also teeangers). With ubiquitous internet why can't one stream the school lessons via internet from home so that everybody can start his/her schoolday when he wants to and only comes for the tests etc. or school activities that involve personal attendance (this could easily be scheduled on afternoon). This could also probably reduce the wasted time of going to school and going home, if you only have to go their where personal attendance is necessary.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Because school isn’t a streamable activity, and hasn’t been for several decades. School today works in a way where the teacher doesn’t teach the students things directly, but where the students try to explore and understand themselves in small groups, with the teacher only giving hints. This technique started in the applied sciences, where the concept of giving students a task, like "find out what this material is" (chemistry), and letting each group then design an experiment on how to test it, and then – after they succeeded or failed – letting each group present their results to the others. Nowadays, it’s used in almost all classes, from language classes to math, from PE to compsci. Streaming such classes – which are the majority in todays schools – would be an impossible task. EDIT: Again, if you downvote, please comment why you did so – an open discussion is always better than just plain downvoting, as it helps understand why you disagree.
  - Steuard 11y ago
    This is certainly in line with everything that's come out of physics education research over the past few decades. (I'm a physics prof, and I try to pay attention to this stuff.) Passively sitting back and listening to lectures can actively hurt student learning (if you ask students how confident they are in their knowledge of physics right before a lecture-style class and then again immediately after, it gets worse). In a head-to-head comparison of exam results between one section of a class taught by an award-winning lecturer and another taught by two first-year grad student TAs trained in active learning techniques, the active learning students won by a mile.
Shivetya 11y ago
I am under the impression that even if you move the start times back eventually the teenagers would adopt to it and they would still have insufficient sleep. Perhaps school six days a week with shorter hours for more days per year? Or just full year schedules with shorter days as you increase in grade? Schools cannot adjust for the schedules of their students times simply because there are too many variances. Start times will simply be followed by changes where the advantage wanted gets lost
jdmichal 11y ago
So if schools start later, what about all those high school students that have jobs? Because, you know, some families rely on that income. This has always been the reasoning I heard for starting high school so early.
dudul 11y ago
That's something I'm still trying to wrap my head around since I moved to the US. Some classes start before 8am, sometimes closer to 7am. This is insanity. When I see the school bus picking up kids in my neighborhood at 6.45 I feel so sorry for the poor bastards. A buddy once told me that they start so early because they need the buses later for little kids. And it has other bad impacts. They most likely get breakfast around 6am. How can they keep it together until 12pm? So of course, they snack on a bag of Cheezy Poofs in the morning. Doesn't help with good eating habits.
_pmf_ 11y ago
How very convenient that we have schools as a catch-all scapegoat for everything that is wrong with society. I'm sure teachers are enthused about getting lots of tips by armchair experts about how they should do their work.
- adrusi 11y ago
  School is an institution that occupies every child full time from age 5–18. Even when they're not physically in school, school dictates the structure of their life. So nearly all of our population experiences their most impressionable, value forming years under the influence of schools, which almost all operate in a similar way. You'd expect this to have a profound effect of behavior, on the level that religion can have. So yes, schools make for a good "catch-all scapegoat" because the impact that they have on society is so large that for any given problem with society, you can probably find a quite reasonable causal link from schools. The term "armchair expert" is used to make anti-intellectual arguments. It's usually not hard to tell the difference between someone arguing a carefully considered position and someone who's just hastily defending their ideas against new information, or whatever it is that people do. Don't lose the signal in the noise. If you don't consider any of it signal, then there's no reason to be in this thread. But it's not like teachers are especially qualified in this area. Some are because they consider it a professional obligation to keep up on such literature and have an informed opinion on the issues the encounter, others simply because they're naturally inclined to care about these matters. But teachers in the US only need a bachelor's degree and a teacher's vocational training. Having a bachelor's degree doesn't make them any more qualified than the average HN commenter, and the vocational training typically doesn't bother with child psychology or pedagogical philosophy. The only factor that makes teachers any more qualified to speak on this than HN commenters is their lived experience working as a teacher. Such experience is subject to bias, for example, selection bias favoring the way thing are because the ones who disagree never became teachers or got fired. More importantly, though, it's not very exclusive experience. Everyone has a reasonable amount of experience with the education system from their 13 years in it as a student. People also get to experience working with children from an adult perspective when they become parents.
Bedon292 11y ago
What I have been wondering is, do later start times really help teenagers? I know when I was going to high school, if I was allowed to sleep in for an extra two hours, I would have stayed up two hours later at night. Meaning I got the exact same amount of sleep. Is this not common? Or does later start time actually lead to more sleep on average? Also, the homework load does not get lighter, so the amount of time they have to stay up to do the homework stays the same. The start time just shifts to later in the day. Is there any research out there that shows changing start times does anything other than shift the entire schedule in the day? With the exact same amount of time spent at school, time doing homework, sleeping, etc.?
- meesles 11y ago
  The thing about sleep is, it's not a factual, hard science thing. Different people need different amounts. Different people feel better waking up at different times. Having a schedule and sticking to it makes you feel more refreshed. Hell, some people barely sleep and seem to be fine. Personally, I can sleep 8 hours and still feel like crap having to wake up at 8AM. If I can sleep till 10, I wake up much more refreshed and immediately ready to start working. In my mind, the only ideal solution for kids is a much more flexible schooling system that runs from the earlier hours to the later ones. Students would be able to select their classes (there's never THAT many in grade school) based on times that are convenient for their mental health and living arrangements. So Suzy could wake up and start classes at 8 and go home at 3, while John, who like me hates early mornings, could start classes at 10 and go home at 5. Of course, a bunch of organizational problems come up and let's not forget that anything run by the government is dreadfully inefficient, but in an ideal world, I think this kind of system would work.
  - Bedon292 11y ago
    Right, I am the same way. Not at all a morning person. I, don't want to get out of bed before 8, at the earliest no matter how much sleep I get. That is why having flexible work hours is important. Many of my co-workers have been at work for 2 hours before I wake up. But that's what they like to do. So nothing wrong with that. Having flexible school, at least for high school teens, would be a really interesting idea. Though like you said, scheduling issues would probably be too complicated.
robg 11y ago
Crazy to me there's no precedent to talk of stress and sleep together. The word stress doesn't appear in this piece. Stress and sleep are the same physiological system. The best way to recover from stress is to sleep. Not surprisingly, increasing stress also inhibits memory, learning, and attention. So by driving a stressful lifestyle with few hours of sleep, students are working against the need to strengthen the brain. Sleep literally seems to refresh us, consolidating new memories and washing away built up toxins. Don't set an alarm clock - set a time to sleep.
known 11y ago
Schools in Japan don't have this problem
Matt3o12_ 11y ago
As a late sleeper (and a high school student), i've found a way to make the 8am classes (waking up at 6:45) more bearable. I used to go to bed at 12 and was tired all the time since I did not get the 7 1/2 hours I needed. When I had classes late (twice a week, waking up at 8:15, 8:45 respectively, and going to bed at 1am), I still felt tired because I did not sleep much the days before. What I do now is go to bed at about 2am and nap for 2 to 3 hours a day. Once I got used to it, it worked out great. I am not tired in the mornings at all and can make it though the whole school day. At 5pm, I start getting tired and that's when I starting taking my nap. At 9-10pm, after dinner, I start doing my homework for which I now have plenty of time and I'm not even tired. That might not work for everybody, but I advice everybody to try out what works best for them.
- throwaway41597 11y ago
  I tried that when I was your age and it didn't work that great for me. I did it because I was just so tired after school that I crashed for hours when I came back. My problem was that I overslept (2 to 4 hours) during the nap and I felt so refreshed I wasn't tired until 2am. So I ended up sleeping only 5 hours for the night, pretty much like you. On the other hand, I was still tired during the day. My point is that naps are good but at some point they're harmful for your night, and 3 hours is getting close. I believe it's better to keep at least 7-hour nights and have 30- to 90- minute naps. But the truth is that school hours are poorly designed. This is a kind of biphasic sleep by the way.
dcgoss 11y ago
I'm currently a sophomore at Harriton High School in PA. Here's what my day looks like. Ideally wake up around 6:20, sometimes I oversleep to 6:40-6:50. Wake up, shower, breakfast if there's time (when I wake up too late, I'll grab some Clif bars on the way out). Run to bus stop, bus comes at 7:02. School starts at 7:30. 6 classes a day, an hour each. Lunch starts around 10:45. School ends at 2:40, sports start at 3:00. Sports normally go until 5:30, occasionally 4:30. I go to bed around 11:30-12.
japhyr 11y ago
> Perhaps more important, the number of car crashes by drivers 16 to 18 was reduced by 70 percent when school start times were changed from 7:35 to 8:55. This is what stood out to me. I'd like to know more about how this study was done, but if it's valid this is one of the most compelling arguments I've seen for changing school start times.
- codingdave 11y ago
  I suspect it might also have something to do with letting all the rush hour traffic get to work first, THEN let teenagers drive around town. Whatever the root cause, if later start times are safer, all the more reason to support making changes.
superobserver 11y ago
News flash: the educational system is utterly broken and still has old throwbacks to America's agrarian past. Remembering when I was a teenager not too long ago, I could have told you the same. To this day, however, I am a night owl, which has also been shown to be more common in more intelligent persons,[0] so it really is a potentially more hard hitting situation to those brighter than average as well. [0] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=vpsd64gAAAAJ&citation_for_view=vpsd64gAAAAJ:_FxGoFyzp5QC https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

331 points by hvo 11y ago

My high school started at 730 am. They always gave bus scheduling as the reason they couldn't have a later start. Basically, the district only had so many buses to allocate for pick-ups, and would stagger start times to make sure the bus count was minimized.

reustle 11y ago
I mean, it is a valid reason. My small town (4k~ people) did the same, high school started at 7:45am and each bus had both a high school / middle school route, and immediately after an elementary school route. Not only would you need twice as many busses, you'd need twice as many drivers. The cost difference is massive. That said, that doesn't mean they can't bump the start time of all the schools up an hour or two.
- saulrh 11y ago
  There's an even easier solution to that: IIRC elementary school kids are way more resistant to sleep deprivation than teenagers, so you can just flip the schedules around and start elementary school kids before teenagers. Downside is probably then that the more-demanding elementary school kids get home earlier, but I think they're already getting home well before the working parent does.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - dripton 11y ago
    Our school system does this. I haven't heard any complaints about it. (And we have a lot of entitled parents who complain about everything else.) I'm surprised that more schools aren't switching.
  - jacalata 11y ago
    I've heard that the reason this isn't the default is that parents get far more upset about making an elementary school kid get up and wait for a bus in the dark than a teenager.
    - Pingviini 11y ago
      Makes sense too, America is way too dangerous to have kids wait for buses in the dark. No doubt they would be kidnapped almost immediately.
      - monocasa 11y ago
        Can't tell if sarcastic or not.
        saulrh 11y ago
        Poe's Law strikes again.
      - jacalata 11y ago
        I understand the arguments are made about the danger of standing next to a road invisibly (especially in shitty places with no sidewalks) but I'm sure some people are worried about kidnapping!
      - ams6110 11y ago
        Heard that argument here when the idea was discussed. The funny thing is that these days (at least for Elementary school) there's always a parent or two who walks their kid to the bus stop and waits with them until the bus comes.
ACow_Adonis 11y ago
"...but then, if that was true, couldn't we be scheduling half of the starts later in the day in order to stagger out the demand for buses even more optimally?" As you can probably tell, I was not a popular child with teachers/authority in my high school days :P

carsongross 11y ago

It is absolutely ridiculous that we make growing humans get out of bed before 8 AM. Pubescent teens should be sleeping 10 hours a night, particularly boys who are in their growth spurts. When I am emperor dictator, no schools open before 9AM.

reustle 11y ago
But, then people will just stay up later. I know that's what I did as I went through schools / jobs. My last job I could get there around 1030am (wake at 9:45~) so I would make sure to get to bed around 2am.
- journeeman 11y ago
  I agree. I used to make the same mistake. Until I realised that it is best to go back to how people slept before electric light was invented; i.e. it is best to align your sleep cycle with the Sun's movement. Of course, maybe it's harder to do this nearer the poles but, in the tropics we get near equal hours of day and night. I have found sleeping early and staying away from modern tech 30-45 mins. before sleep to be _immensely_ beneficial.
  - fpoling 11y ago
    Even at 60 latitude it is still possible to wake up durung winter if not after sunrise but at least at dawn if one can afford to wake up at 8:00. For a while I had to wake before 6:00 and it really sucked at winter when sunrise here is after 9:00. This has little to do with the amount of sleeping. To my surprise I managed to switch to going to bed before 10pm. It is precisely waking up in the dark that was problematic.
- madengr 11y ago
  Ditto here in grad school. Coincidence though the pub closed at 1 am.
- bendykstra 11y ago
  Your personal experience doesn't comport with the findings of sleep researchers. Later work or school start times correlate with increased sleep. This is due to biological influences on behavior (people feel tired at night and go to bed.) To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at 6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?

cesarbs 11y ago

Going a bit off topic here (since my kid is still in elementary), but I wish schools started later for more selfish reasons. Our kid naturally wakes up early but the Mrs. and I are night owls. We've been miserable since our kid started going to school. We've been trying to force ourselves to go to bed earlier than its natural to us, with varying degrees of success, but most weeks are spent half asleep most of the time because waking up at 7am just doesn't work for us. I can't wait for middle school when the kiddo will likely be old enough to wake up on her own, fix herself up and go catch the school bus.

Evenjos 11y ago
My parents were night owls, and so was I. Waking up before dawn was a nightmarish hell for me, all through junior high and high school.
- ihsw 11y ago
  I am, and mine is 7 years old. I have noticed a change in his morning routine that seems irreversible. Previously he woke around 5am, but now it is after 7am every day. As someone that is definitely not a morning person, I think I am starting to rub off.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  Likewise for me. Upon starting college (and getting rid of morning classes), I found I slept better (and longer), had less migraines, and retained information better with less effort.
- trill1 11y ago
  Same here. I surfed the internet and played computer games until 1 or 2 AM every night, and then spent a lot of time in junior high and high school nodding out in class. I really learned almost nothing, which isn't the fault of my teachers or anyone else. I would have been better off in a radically less structured educational environment, something as simple as being put in a room alone with some books and an offline computer for 4 hours a day, with long breaks in between to exercise and socialize.
11y ago

sgentle 11y ago

I predict this will be a difficult sell, for the reasons pg outlined in "Why Nerds are Unpopular" (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html): > Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend. Schools are government-subsidised daycare first, educational institutions second, which is the reason they often fail at teaching students but rarely fail at keeping them in place. From that perspective, why would you change a child's school hours to anything less compatible with their parents' work hours? If anything, I would expect the trend to be towards longer hours at school, perhaps by more tightly integrating after-school activities.

MichaelGG 11y ago
So start actual classes later, then kids/parents can decide if the parent's poor scheduling should impact the child.
- peter_mcrae 11y ago
  Having a job (which provides for your children) that requires you to be at work at a certain time is poor scheduling?
  - terinjokes 11y ago
    If classes ending at 3 happened across an entire area, I'm sure the high school jobs would move to accommodate. My 11th and 12th years happened in 2008/2009 so good luck having a job as a high schooler.
    - monocasa 11y ago
      He was talking about the parents' jobs.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Why wouldn't it be? It might be necessary but it's still a bad thing.

honua 11y ago

Why did you bother having a child then? Really? You're excited until they wake up by themselves, get ready and go away? So what's the point of their life and yours intersecting? A few minutes after school to say 'hey' before they go off to do homework and sleep? I appreciate that not everyone can do this, but my wife and I home school our daughter, and one of the very things we talk about is that we're glad we don't have to wake up earlier than our bodies need to get the child somewhere. That's not the main reason we home school, but it's a nice benefit. Edit: I meant to add that the main reason we home school is to get to spend the most amount of time with her as we can. It's such a precious time and I wouldn't want to see her gone most of the day.

austinjp 11y ago
I think that's harsh, smacks of competitive parentism, and dismisses the value of sleep. You can love your children but struggle with aspects of their behaviour, and you certainly can't predict what they're going to be longer before they've been born. Every parent I know loves their children and is delighted with them, but they leap at any opportunity to spend time without them. A night out with adult friends while the kids sleep at the grandparents' is a luxury to be seized. Not quite what the previous poster was getting at, just another data point in the complex relationship between parent and child.
dang 11y ago
> Why did you bother having a child then? Really? This is unduly personal and not in the spirit of civility which is supposed to govern this site. In fact it's a downright nasty response to cesarbs's perfectly cordial comment. Please don't post like this. If you'd left (or edited) out the first paragraph, the comment would have made your point without putting someone else down. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410231 and marked it off-topic.
- kuschku 11y ago
  By the way, @dang, is there a specific amount of karma after which I can post comments more often? Most of the time I get questions as comments to my comments, and can’t answer them because of "You are submitting too fast". So I type my answer to that comment, leave the browser tab open, and wait an hour to submit it. This obviously makes discussion with others quite problematic, and I’ve even thought about starting a second account just to be able to answer other comments with less than a few hours delay. (Ironically, this comment was also posted in a similar way: I wrote it 2 hours before posting, but had to wait again and again for the "You are submitting too fast" to end).

sullstice 11y ago

I think when it comes to schools and large institutions like universities, their term should be: "Too big to succeed" We need education to be able to change fast and adapt. Something we clearly cannot get with these large institutions.

adamnemecek 11y ago

Let's not even talk about the fact that educational system is extremely inefficient and is prone to wasting student's time. One would think that after spending 6-8 hours a day for 12 years that you'd come out somewhat knowledgeable about something.

meric 11y ago
Having moved into an English speaking country at 9, school helped me become fluent in English. I also attribute my arithmetic skills to my schooling, the calculus knowledge immediately put to use in the computer game I was writing. I also more or less enjoyed my history lessons. It helped me better immerse in Age of Empires at night.
- adamnemecek 11y ago
  Inefficient isn't the same a absolutely useless.
  - meric 11y ago
    'Somewhat knowledgeable about something'. I think I would qualify...
kuschku 11y ago
You are if you come out of high school. You understand the global history since the neolithical times rougly, and your own contintents history since the 1500s pretty exactly. You understand how algebra, analysis, stochastic work, and can do simple mathematical proofs. You know the laws of physics, how and why things work, you have learnt general and special relativity, and even know parts of quantum mechanics, including being able to work with the probability functions of electrons. You know basic chemistry, understand what each element is, know a large part of organic and inorganic chemistry, have experimented with it, and can explain why some molecular bindings work, and why some don’t. You speak fluently 3 to 4 languages, and can read standard literature in them, as well as being able to write essays about cultural topics in them. You have had PE, know how to play a majority of sports, and have a physical condition where you are able to play them. You know the historical styles of art produced, and when and where they were produced, and have experience working in a majority of styles yourself. You know how our political system and our economy works, and know how to do accounting and taxes for yourself. You know how to start a company, and the trade offs of different types of incorporation. You are able to work in teams, can delegate work, know how to learn things from existing sources and do your own research, how to write scientific papers, can debate with others in a civil way. ________________________ Excerpted and translated from the curriculum for high school students in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, 2012. (And I can attest that what I learnt in school fits this description)

nod 11y ago

Seattle Public Schools, for one, has taken this to heart and rearranged the schedule for next year. Elementaries now get the early starts, and the high schools will start at 9:35 AM.

clevernickname 11y ago

about fucking time common sense caught up with academia

YZF 11y ago

My 16 year old home-schooled daughter wakes up at noon... By the way, where I went to school we had 7am (!!!) classes ... I used to sleep in and just skip them as a teen ;) My personal schedule as an adult is to start working around 10am. Oddly enough when I am on vacation I tend to trend towards getting up earlier. If I need to get to work early for a meeting e.g. I tend to feel very tired the entire day. I think some lot of this is related to how our sleep patterns are screwed up by artificial lighting. When we go camping we generally don't have fires and we go to sleep when the sun sets down and get up when it comes up. It all feels very natural after you've done a few days of that...

peferron 11y ago
Try camping one full year in Ireland (beautiful country) and see how natural it feels to sleep 7 hrs in summer and 17 hrs in winter. And Ireland isn't even that far north.

wolfgke 11y ago

Let's assume that everybody has his own natural sleeping schedule (so also teeangers). With ubiquitous internet why can't one stream the school lessons via internet from home so that everybody can start his/her schoolday when he wants to and only comes for the tests etc. or school activities that involve personal attendance (this could easily be scheduled on afternoon). This could also probably reduce the wasted time of going to school and going home, if you only have to go their where personal attendance is necessary.

kuschku 11y ago
Because school isn’t a streamable activity, and hasn’t been for several decades. School today works in a way where the teacher doesn’t teach the students things directly, but where the students try to explore and understand themselves in small groups, with the teacher only giving hints. This technique started in the applied sciences, where the concept of giving students a task, like "find out what this material is" (chemistry), and letting each group then design an experiment on how to test it, and then – after they succeeded or failed – letting each group present their results to the others. Nowadays, it’s used in almost all classes, from language classes to math, from PE to compsci. Streaming such classes – which are the majority in todays schools – would be an impossible task. EDIT: Again, if you downvote, please comment why you did so – an open discussion is always better than just plain downvoting, as it helps understand why you disagree.
- Steuard 11y ago
  This is certainly in line with everything that's come out of physics education research over the past few decades. (I'm a physics prof, and I try to pay attention to this stuff.) Passively sitting back and listening to lectures can actively hurt student learning (if you ask students how confident they are in their knowledge of physics right before a lecture-style class and then again immediately after, it gets worse). In a head-to-head comparison of exam results between one section of a class taught by an award-winning lecturer and another taught by two first-year grad student TAs trained in active learning techniques, the active learning students won by a mile.

Shivetya 11y ago

I am under the impression that even if you move the start times back eventually the teenagers would adopt to it and they would still have insufficient sleep. Perhaps school six days a week with shorter hours for more days per year? Or just full year schedules with shorter days as you increase in grade? Schools cannot adjust for the schedules of their students times simply because there are too many variances. Start times will simply be followed by changes where the advantage wanted gets lost

jdmichal 11y ago

So if schools start later, what about all those high school students that have jobs? Because, you know, some families rely on that income. This has always been the reasoning I heard for starting high school so early.

dudul 11y ago

That's something I'm still trying to wrap my head around since I moved to the US. Some classes start before 8am, sometimes closer to 7am. This is insanity. When I see the school bus picking up kids in my neighborhood at 6.45 I feel so sorry for the poor bastards. A buddy once told me that they start so early because they need the buses later for little kids. And it has other bad impacts. They most likely get breakfast around 6am. How can they keep it together until 12pm? So of course, they snack on a bag of Cheezy Poofs in the morning. Doesn't help with good eating habits.

_pmf_ 11y ago

How very convenient that we have schools as a catch-all scapegoat for everything that is wrong with society. I'm sure teachers are enthused about getting lots of tips by armchair experts about how they should do their work.

adrusi 11y ago
School is an institution that occupies every child full time from age 5–18. Even when they're not physically in school, school dictates the structure of their life. So nearly all of our population experiences their most impressionable, value forming years under the influence of schools, which almost all operate in a similar way. You'd expect this to have a profound effect of behavior, on the level that religion can have. So yes, schools make for a good "catch-all scapegoat" because the impact that they have on society is so large that for any given problem with society, you can probably find a quite reasonable causal link from schools. The term "armchair expert" is used to make anti-intellectual arguments. It's usually not hard to tell the difference between someone arguing a carefully considered position and someone who's just hastily defending their ideas against new information, or whatever it is that people do. Don't lose the signal in the noise. If you don't consider any of it signal, then there's no reason to be in this thread. But it's not like teachers are especially qualified in this area. Some are because they consider it a professional obligation to keep up on such literature and have an informed opinion on the issues the encounter, others simply because they're naturally inclined to care about these matters. But teachers in the US only need a bachelor's degree and a teacher's vocational training. Having a bachelor's degree doesn't make them any more qualified than the average HN commenter, and the vocational training typically doesn't bother with child psychology or pedagogical philosophy. The only factor that makes teachers any more qualified to speak on this than HN commenters is their lived experience working as a teacher. Such experience is subject to bias, for example, selection bias favoring the way thing are because the ones who disagree never became teachers or got fired. More importantly, though, it's not very exclusive experience. Everyone has a reasonable amount of experience with the education system from their 13 years in it as a student. People also get to experience working with children from an adult perspective when they become parents.

Bedon292 11y ago

What I have been wondering is, do later start times really help teenagers? I know when I was going to high school, if I was allowed to sleep in for an extra two hours, I would have stayed up two hours later at night. Meaning I got the exact same amount of sleep. Is this not common? Or does later start time actually lead to more sleep on average? Also, the homework load does not get lighter, so the amount of time they have to stay up to do the homework stays the same. The start time just shifts to later in the day. Is there any research out there that shows changing start times does anything other than shift the entire schedule in the day? With the exact same amount of time spent at school, time doing homework, sleeping, etc.?

meesles 11y ago
The thing about sleep is, it's not a factual, hard science thing. Different people need different amounts. Different people feel better waking up at different times. Having a schedule and sticking to it makes you feel more refreshed. Hell, some people barely sleep and seem to be fine. Personally, I can sleep 8 hours and still feel like crap having to wake up at 8AM. If I can sleep till 10, I wake up much more refreshed and immediately ready to start working. In my mind, the only ideal solution for kids is a much more flexible schooling system that runs from the earlier hours to the later ones. Students would be able to select their classes (there's never THAT many in grade school) based on times that are convenient for their mental health and living arrangements. So Suzy could wake up and start classes at 8 and go home at 3, while John, who like me hates early mornings, could start classes at 10 and go home at 5. Of course, a bunch of organizational problems come up and let's not forget that anything run by the government is dreadfully inefficient, but in an ideal world, I think this kind of system would work.
- Bedon292 11y ago
  Right, I am the same way. Not at all a morning person. I, don't want to get out of bed before 8, at the earliest no matter how much sleep I get. That is why having flexible work hours is important. Many of my co-workers have been at work for 2 hours before I wake up. But that's what they like to do. So nothing wrong with that. Having flexible school, at least for high school teens, would be a really interesting idea. Though like you said, scheduling issues would probably be too complicated.

robg 11y ago

Crazy to me there's no precedent to talk of stress and sleep together. The word stress doesn't appear in this piece. Stress and sleep are the same physiological system. The best way to recover from stress is to sleep. Not surprisingly, increasing stress also inhibits memory, learning, and attention. So by driving a stressful lifestyle with few hours of sleep, students are working against the need to strengthen the brain. Sleep literally seems to refresh us, consolidating new memories and washing away built up toxins. Don't set an alarm clock - set a time to sleep.

known 11y ago

Schools in Japan don't have this problem

Matt3o12_ 11y ago

As a late sleeper (and a high school student), i've found a way to make the 8am classes (waking up at 6:45) more bearable. I used to go to bed at 12 and was tired all the time since I did not get the 7 1/2 hours I needed. When I had classes late (twice a week, waking up at 8:15, 8:45 respectively, and going to bed at 1am), I still felt tired because I did not sleep much the days before. What I do now is go to bed at about 2am and nap for 2 to 3 hours a day. Once I got used to it, it worked out great. I am not tired in the mornings at all and can make it though the whole school day. At 5pm, I start getting tired and that's when I starting taking my nap. At 9-10pm, after dinner, I start doing my homework for which I now have plenty of time and I'm not even tired. That might not work for everybody, but I advice everybody to try out what works best for them.

throwaway41597 11y ago
I tried that when I was your age and it didn't work that great for me. I did it because I was just so tired after school that I crashed for hours when I came back. My problem was that I overslept (2 to 4 hours) during the nap and I felt so refreshed I wasn't tired until 2am. So I ended up sleeping only 5 hours for the night, pretty much like you. On the other hand, I was still tired during the day. My point is that naps are good but at some point they're harmful for your night, and 3 hours is getting close. I believe it's better to keep at least 7-hour nights and have 30- to 90- minute naps. But the truth is that school hours are poorly designed. This is a kind of biphasic sleep by the way.

dcgoss 11y ago

I'm currently a sophomore at Harriton High School in PA. Here's what my day looks like. Ideally wake up around 6:20, sometimes I oversleep to 6:40-6:50. Wake up, shower, breakfast if there's time (when I wake up too late, I'll grab some Clif bars on the way out). Run to bus stop, bus comes at 7:02. School starts at 7:30. 6 classes a day, an hour each. Lunch starts around 10:45. School ends at 2:40, sports start at 3:00. Sports normally go until 5:30, occasionally 4:30. I go to bed around 11:30-12.

japhyr 11y ago

> Perhaps more important, the number of car crashes by drivers 16 to 18 was reduced by 70 percent when school start times were changed from 7:35 to 8:55. This is what stood out to me. I'd like to know more about how this study was done, but if it's valid this is one of the most compelling arguments I've seen for changing school start times.

codingdave 11y ago
I suspect it might also have something to do with letting all the rush hour traffic get to work first, THEN let teenagers drive around town. Whatever the root cause, if later start times are safer, all the more reason to support making changes.

superobserver 11y ago

News flash: the educational system is utterly broken and still has old throwbacks to America's agrarian past. Remembering when I was a teenager not too long ago, I could have told you the same. To this day, however, I am a night owl, which has also been shown to be more common in more intelligent persons,[0] so it really is a potentially more hard hitting situation to those brighter than average as well. [0] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=vpsd64gAAAAJ&citation_for_view=vpsd64gAAAAJ:_FxGoFyzp5QC https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...