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1. School times are way too early for most teens. I am sure that just not having to get up that soon is doing a lot for their overall wellbeing. 2. American hi

1. School times are way too early for most teens. I am sure that just not having to get up that soon is doing a lot for their overall wellbeing. 2. American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in, and would give the most "hostile workplaces" a run for their money. They suck for the nerdy kid who wants to be left to his / her own devices. They suck for the middling kids who don't want to be on the perpetual status treadmill.

baxtr 6y ago
Trust me, high schools outside of the US as well. There’s something about that age span that is very exciting but aggravating at the same time. I am happy for me that I passed without major injuries, physical and mental.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  Teens are horrible across the world, but some cultures manage school life a bit better (of course, probably with some other trade-offs). Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers. Parents-from-hell exist but at least when I was growing up, discipline was expected, teachers were given the benefit of doubt instead of always siding with the kids, kids actually used to be somewhat scared of teachers and the principal (I mean sure they would make fun of them behind their back but at least there was some amount of deference to authority) and the overall environment kept kids in line. The kind of bullying that passes for normal in American schools would never fly. I mean it doesn't fly in American workplaces either. It's the kind of bullshit we only tolerate in schools for some reason.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers. I can confirm this is true of Chinese.
  - wisty 6y ago
    Chinese and Indian schools might be run like a boot camp, but that's better than running the school like a prison (forced attendance but less structure).
  - sharadov 6y ago
    Really India is good? The only things that the education system there is geared to do is have kids cram stuff and regurgitate it and create assembly lines of mindless robots. No emphasis on analytical skills or any focus on music, theater, art or sports. Hell, 90% of schools don't have basic facilities like a playground. I went to a school where I got an all-rounded experience, but was fortunate and it's an elitist institution ( akin to a prep-school here), so out of reach of many. You can criticize the American school system as much as you want, but for the most part it does a pretty good job. Bullying can get bad, but some of it is also teaching you critical life skills. There is plenty of workplace bullying too, you know what you do, you grow some balls and stand up to the bully.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
      > No emphasis on analytical skills or any focus on music, theater, art or sports. Hell, 90% of schools don't have basic facilities like a playground. Which part of implementing this in American schools needs them to be the hell-holes they are?
      - sharadov 6y ago
        Hell holes? I see a wee bit of exaggeration there. You make it sound like West-Africa. And Indian schools had capital punishment, you got your ass-kicked by teachers, not sure if its still the same or not?
        fjh 6y ago
        Corporal punishment, hopefully.
        andrepd 6y ago
        Not if you're in that Rowan Atkinson skit
        sharadov 6y ago
        haha yes.
  - licebmi__at__ 6y ago
    As a non american who went to a pretty strict school, I can say that my school life was hell because the teachers didn't care about the rest of the classroom bullying me until it affected their class personally, that's it, when I dared to fight back; and my parents siding with the teachers didn't help the least bit. A strict environment might be good for education, but I don't think helps reduce bullying.
  - ausjke 6y ago
    This seems to be true, some of the public high school(and middle school for the most part) are absolutely hell in US. In Asia kids actually respect their teachers as some honorable adults or even role models, it's a culture thing. The teachers are also graduated from good colleges and earning a decent pay. It's a whole different scenario. by the way, as for the skin-color-based and gender-based AA admission policies, that does not exist at all in Asia.
  - ausjke 6y ago
    why is the parent post voted down? I feel what it described is very insightful to me.
- jeltz 6y ago
  The high school I went to in Sweden was perfectly fine. No bullying, not that much stress. And it was just a normal average public high school, nothing special. Middle school on the other hand was hell. In general I have heard of much more people being bullied in middle school compared to only one or two in high school.
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    I'm from the US and had the same experience.
  - op00to 6y ago
    I was sexually abused in the locker room, attacked walking to/from school, had balloons filled with piss thrown at me, and constantly dealt with a feeling that I was not good enough and never would be good enough which sticks to this day. The administration encouraged much of this. I am putting serious thought into removing my children from school once this shit starts.
kyawzazaw 6y ago
1. I think it's only earlier this way in the US because of school buses and parents need to go to school. Here in my country, most start at either 8 or 9.
- soperj 6y ago
  My kids are elementary students, both wake up at 8:30 naturally (go to bed at 7:30). To eat, get ready and bike to school for a 840 start, they need to be up by 7:30 at the very latest. Couldn't imagine having an 8am start, let alone earlier, especially as they age.
  - nostromo95 6y ago
    They sleep for 13 hours a day?
    - brightball 6y ago
      I had some friends who’s kids were like that and couldn’t believe it. Ours went to sleep at 8 and woke up at 5:30-6am just naturally. As they get older of course, they want to sleep a lot later.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      Yeah that's a good bit more than the 9-12 average. As a parent of elementary age kids myself, I'd suspect there was some amount of not-sleeping actually happening overnight. My son is particularly adept at playing with legos and such even in the dark. My daughter is fond of waking up at 1am and reading for a couple hours, then going back to sleep until 8:30am.
      - genocidicbunny 6y ago
        I am not sure exactly how widespread it is/was, but as I understand that biphasic sleep was pretty common before artificial light and the rise of civilization. With the recent dropping of external pressure to get up as early or go to bed as late, it's not terribly surprising that some people would gravitate towards that; Kids even more so -- their sleep patterns are not quite as well established. It's pretty likely they're not actually sleeping all those 13 hours. If they were, I would be suspicious of some other underlying cause.
dforrestwilson 6y ago
Since quarantine started I've noticed many more teenage daughters tagging along with their moms on errands and walks in the middle of the day. Probably positive for self-esteem and growth. Perhaps schools now are too focused on academic scores alone and too ignorant of negative social dynamics.
- andrepd 6y ago
  The cynical view would be that school is there to manufacture good workers for the future wage-labour rat race. So they aren't focused on things beyond so-called "practical" development by design. I don't necessarily agree 100% with this view but I'm sure it has some grain of truth.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    >future wage-labour rat race The cynical view is that school is there to manufacture good workers for 18th century Prussia. Serving the modern economy would be a major step up.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  This was the top post on r/teenager. https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/iy9do9/for_me_barely_anything_changed https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/iy9do9/for_me_ba... You sit at your desk most of the time in your classroom. The same way you do at home in an online class. But home is relatively more comfy. You are allowed to eat, stretch, sit anyway you like, take a walk, go to washroom as many times as you want, and play a game on the side in an online class. Less chances for kids to bully each other and if they did, digital evidence of it is available. Some teachers behave better. I wish some sort of hybrid will come. Activities that require sitting in a classroom should be shifted to remote while others can be built into a separate school.
siltpotato 6y ago
The last two years of high school, starting one summer, I started waking up before daylight to run because if I woke up later it would be too hot outside. I kept this habit into the winter because habits and also because being the source of your winter heat feels great. Come to think of it, I remember now that I also would wake up at 5:30 at around 10 years because there was a cartoon I liked at that time.
poulsbohemian 6y ago
>American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in, I appreciate the sentiment here, but what??? I went through the biggest high school in my state. It was a meat grinder. But it absolutely pales in comparison to the nasty experiences I had in corporate America. I could write a book on all the nasty legally questionable shit I saw.
- op00to 6y ago
  My job never made me want to kill myself, there were numerous suicides in my 90s high school career.
  - 542354234235 6y ago
    I think high school is subjectively difficult due to the stage of life you are at when you go through it. As an adult, you have likely developed coping mechanisms to deal with stressors. You have had multiple relationships, both romantic and social, and have experience in losing people and navigating those relationships and social webs. You know your own mind better and have more experience just understanding yourself and your strengths and weaknesses. You have experience balancing priorities, commitments, and goals; work time, time to recharge, time to socialize. Going through high school now in my 30s would be trivial to my mental health, but to my underdeveloped teen brain, it was overwhelming and couldn’t have been more serious. Now of course I am not saying that means those problems aren’t important or that we shouldn’t do everything we can to improve them. I think we should specifically because of the unique mentally vulnerable position the teenager is in.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
908B64B197 6y ago
One of the things that I remember most from schooling (elementary through high school) was the amount of time spent doing discipline/class management. Or repeating and answering questions. Plus the whole lecture format doesn't work for everyone. Remote school probably cuts down on these things. Furthermore, for self-directed kids, there's always the possibility of simply going mostly asynchronous, watching lectures and reading textbook at their own pace (which might be faster than regular class now that most distractions are removed!).

baxtr 6y ago

Trust me, high schools outside of the US as well. There’s something about that age span that is very exciting but aggravating at the same time. I am happy for me that I passed without major injuries, physical and mental.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
Teens are horrible across the world, but some cultures manage school life a bit better (of course, probably with some other trade-offs). Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers. Parents-from-hell exist but at least when I was growing up, discipline was expected, teachers were given the benefit of doubt instead of always siding with the kids, kids actually used to be somewhat scared of teachers and the principal (I mean sure they would make fun of them behind their back but at least there was some amount of deference to authority) and the overall environment kept kids in line. The kind of bullying that passes for normal in American schools would never fly. I mean it doesn't fly in American workplaces either. It's the kind of bullshit we only tolerate in schools for some reason.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers. I can confirm this is true of Chinese.
- wisty 6y ago
  Chinese and Indian schools might be run like a boot camp, but that's better than running the school like a prison (forced attendance but less structure).
- sharadov 6y ago
  Really India is good? The only things that the education system there is geared to do is have kids cram stuff and regurgitate it and create assembly lines of mindless robots. No emphasis on analytical skills or any focus on music, theater, art or sports. Hell, 90% of schools don't have basic facilities like a playground. I went to a school where I got an all-rounded experience, but was fortunate and it's an elitist institution ( akin to a prep-school here), so out of reach of many. You can criticize the American school system as much as you want, but for the most part it does a pretty good job. Bullying can get bad, but some of it is also teaching you critical life skills. There is plenty of workplace bullying too, you know what you do, you grow some balls and stand up to the bully.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    > No emphasis on analytical skills or any focus on music, theater, art or sports. Hell, 90% of schools don't have basic facilities like a playground. Which part of implementing this in American schools needs them to be the hell-holes they are?
    - sharadov 6y ago
      Hell holes? I see a wee bit of exaggeration there. You make it sound like West-Africa. And Indian schools had capital punishment, you got your ass-kicked by teachers, not sure if its still the same or not?
      - fjh 6y ago
        Corporal punishment, hopefully.
        andrepd 6y ago
        Not if you're in that Rowan Atkinson skit
        sharadov 6y ago
        haha yes.
- licebmi__at__ 6y ago
  As a non american who went to a pretty strict school, I can say that my school life was hell because the teachers didn't care about the rest of the classroom bullying me until it affected their class personally, that's it, when I dared to fight back; and my parents siding with the teachers didn't help the least bit. A strict environment might be good for education, but I don't think helps reduce bullying.
- ausjke 6y ago
  This seems to be true, some of the public high school(and middle school for the most part) are absolutely hell in US. In Asia kids actually respect their teachers as some honorable adults or even role models, it's a culture thing. The teachers are also graduated from good colleges and earning a decent pay. It's a whole different scenario. by the way, as for the skin-color-based and gender-based AA admission policies, that does not exist at all in Asia.
- ausjke 6y ago
  why is the parent post voted down? I feel what it described is very insightful to me.
jeltz 6y ago
The high school I went to in Sweden was perfectly fine. No bullying, not that much stress. And it was just a normal average public high school, nothing special. Middle school on the other hand was hell. In general I have heard of much more people being bullied in middle school compared to only one or two in high school.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I'm from the US and had the same experience.
- op00to 6y ago
  I was sexually abused in the locker room, attacked walking to/from school, had balloons filled with piss thrown at me, and constantly dealt with a feeling that I was not good enough and never would be good enough which sticks to this day. The administration encouraged much of this. I am putting serious thought into removing my children from school once this shit starts.

kyawzazaw 6y ago

1. I think it's only earlier this way in the US because of school buses and parents need to go to school. Here in my country, most start at either 8 or 9.

soperj 6y ago
My kids are elementary students, both wake up at 8:30 naturally (go to bed at 7:30). To eat, get ready and bike to school for a 840 start, they need to be up by 7:30 at the very latest. Couldn't imagine having an 8am start, let alone earlier, especially as they age.
- nostromo95 6y ago
  They sleep for 13 hours a day?
  - brightball 6y ago
    I had some friends who’s kids were like that and couldn’t believe it. Ours went to sleep at 8 and woke up at 5:30-6am just naturally. As they get older of course, they want to sleep a lot later.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    Yeah that's a good bit more than the 9-12 average. As a parent of elementary age kids myself, I'd suspect there was some amount of not-sleeping actually happening overnight. My son is particularly adept at playing with legos and such even in the dark. My daughter is fond of waking up at 1am and reading for a couple hours, then going back to sleep until 8:30am.
    - genocidicbunny 6y ago
      I am not sure exactly how widespread it is/was, but as I understand that biphasic sleep was pretty common before artificial light and the rise of civilization. With the recent dropping of external pressure to get up as early or go to bed as late, it's not terribly surprising that some people would gravitate towards that; Kids even more so -- their sleep patterns are not quite as well established. It's pretty likely they're not actually sleeping all those 13 hours. If they were, I would be suspicious of some other underlying cause.

dforrestwilson 6y ago

Since quarantine started I've noticed many more teenage daughters tagging along with their moms on errands and walks in the middle of the day. Probably positive for self-esteem and growth. Perhaps schools now are too focused on academic scores alone and too ignorant of negative social dynamics.

andrepd 6y ago
The cynical view would be that school is there to manufacture good workers for the future wage-labour rat race. So they aren't focused on things beyond so-called "practical" development by design. I don't necessarily agree 100% with this view but I'm sure it has some grain of truth.
- closeparen 6y ago
  >future wage-labour rat race The cynical view is that school is there to manufacture good workers for 18th century Prussia. Serving the modern economy would be a major step up.
searchableguy 6y ago
This was the top post on r/teenager. https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/iy9do9/for_me_barely_anything_changed https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/iy9do9/for_me_ba... You sit at your desk most of the time in your classroom. The same way you do at home in an online class. But home is relatively more comfy. You are allowed to eat, stretch, sit anyway you like, take a walk, go to washroom as many times as you want, and play a game on the side in an online class. Less chances for kids to bully each other and if they did, digital evidence of it is available. Some teachers behave better. I wish some sort of hybrid will come. Activities that require sitting in a classroom should be shifted to remote while others can be built into a separate school.

siltpotato 6y ago

The last two years of high school, starting one summer, I started waking up before daylight to run because if I woke up later it would be too hot outside. I kept this habit into the winter because habits and also because being the source of your winter heat feels great. Come to think of it, I remember now that I also would wake up at 5:30 at around 10 years because there was a cartoon I liked at that time.

poulsbohemian 6y ago

>American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in, I appreciate the sentiment here, but what??? I went through the biggest high school in my state. It was a meat grinder. But it absolutely pales in comparison to the nasty experiences I had in corporate America. I could write a book on all the nasty legally questionable shit I saw.

op00to 6y ago
My job never made me want to kill myself, there were numerous suicides in my 90s high school career.
- 542354234235 6y ago
  I think high school is subjectively difficult due to the stage of life you are at when you go through it. As an adult, you have likely developed coping mechanisms to deal with stressors. You have had multiple relationships, both romantic and social, and have experience in losing people and navigating those relationships and social webs. You know your own mind better and have more experience just understanding yourself and your strengths and weaknesses. You have experience balancing priorities, commitments, and goals; work time, time to recharge, time to socialize. Going through high school now in my 30s would be trivial to my mental health, but to my underdeveloped teen brain, it was overwhelming and couldn’t have been more serious. Now of course I am not saying that means those problems aren’t important or that we shouldn’t do everything we can to improve them. I think we should specifically because of the unique mentally vulnerable position the teenager is in.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

908B64B197 6y ago

One of the things that I remember most from schooling (elementary through high school) was the amount of time spent doing discipline/class management. Or repeating and answering questions. Plus the whole lecture format doesn't work for everyone. Remote school probably cuts down on these things. Furthermore, for self-directed kids, there's always the possibility of simply going mostly asynchronous, watching lectures and reading textbook at their own pace (which might be faster than regular class now that most distractions are removed!).