26 ms·

The state finally letting teens sleep in

tailspin2019 4y ago
> Terra Ziporyn Snider of Severna Park, Maryland, still remembers how difficult it was for her son to wake up for his 7:17 a.m. first-period class… > That’s about to change in California, when a law—the first of its kind in the nation—goes into effect on July 1 requiring the state’s public high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., and its middle schools no earlier than 8 a.m. Wow. I may need to reassess my definition of “sleeping in”. (Spoken as someone who had incredible difficulty getting to school by 8.50am back in the day and who hasn’t gotten up before 10.30am in the last week!)
- mod 4y ago
  I had to get up at 5:30AM in high school to catch the bus in time. My bus ride was 45 minutes, and I was the first pickup. In the afternoon, I was the last dropoff, which I thought was grossly unfair.
  - input_sh 4y ago
    Hah, same for 3/4 years of my high school! I've managed to train myself to fall asleep on the way back and wake up when the noise in the bus quiets down, in between the second to last and my stop.
- MarcScott 4y ago
  When I was teaching, I'd get into school for about 7:15am (so wake up at about 5am), so I could make sure I was prepared for my lessons that day. My first class was never before 9am, and school ended at 3:30pm. I just couldn't have coped classes starting that early.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    What did you do for two hours fifteen minutes?
    - MarcScott 4y ago
      - Write lesson plans for the department. - Prepare materials for students to work on. - Mark students' work. - Write assessment reports on students for parents. - Write department action plans. - Complete SEN reports on selected students. - Complete CPD in electronics and CS to upskill in the subjects I taught. - Prototype new projects that the students would engage with in the future. I could go on. For about every hour I spent actually teaching in a classroom, there was half an hour spent planning, assessing or completing admin work. I regularly worked 12 hour days, plus weekends, and all those long holiday that we were supposed to get.
      - bonzini 4y ago
        I was talking specifically of the morning.
        filleduchaos 4y ago
        Personally, nothing about the answer implies that the given list was not tackled in the morning.
        bonzini 4y ago
        It also didn't include anything that had to be done in the morning such as commuting. I am not suggesting that school should start at 7:15 but, if school began and ended earlier, all of those activities could be moved after school ended (possibly to the previous day).
        MarcScott 4y ago
        That was my morning, my evenings, my weekends and my "holidays". I could have added more to the list. Teaching is not about babysitting kids for 60 minutes while you scroll though a PowerPoint.
- messe 4y ago
  Ireland here. My school (which thought entirely through Irish, aside from English lessons, obviously, advertised itself as starting and finishing early, and it started at 08:30 as well.
- dgfitz 4y ago
  I went to a high school in the same district as this one, 7:17 am was absolutely brutal. I had it timed down to the minute so I could sleep as long as possible and not be late once I started driving myself.
- yashap 4y ago
  Yeah, my high school started at 8:50 am too, and that still felt too early. This article mentioned that Seattle high schools used to start at 7:50 am, that seems absolutely nuts. I’d peg roughly 9:30 am as a good time for high schools to start.
- codefreeordie 4y ago
  Does that law account for "zero period"? From my quick reading of the bill, I think it does not -- so probably not that much will actually change. School may start at 8:30, but zero period will still start around 7:30, and some schools might create a double-zero to go earlier still. It is absurd how early schools start. Objectively, there was no good reason why I had to be on my spot on the field at 7:08a every morning only to be done by 2:50p.
  - mdouglass 4y ago
    The law does actually - you can have zero period but it can’t count towards the instructional time required for students. It’s actually deeply annoying for my daughter’s high school. It already started 1st period at 830, but since 0 period no longer “counts”, the day is getting extended by almost an hour for all students. This is from an email from our district earlier in the year: The exceptions to this are zero period classes. Since zero period classes are optional and not required, these classes may begin before 8:30 AM; they just cannot be used to meet the instructional minute's requirements of 64,800 annual schoolwide instructional minutes
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    What is zero period?
    - codefreeordie 4y ago
      The period before 1st period. 1st period being the first "official" period of the day, which now can't begin before 8:30a. Originally, it began life as the before-school time for athletics and other organized extra-curriculars, but once it existed, it became a full-fledged period of instruction, as high-achieving students needed to cram ever more "elective" courses in order to compete for the top university slots. Even 25 years ago when I was in high school, there was talk of creating a double-zero for the athletics, the marching band, and the extra-curriculars, so that elite students could "still afford" to do them. In my district, it didn't happen (With zero starting at 7:08a, double-zero would have been 6:03a, if I'm remembering class length correctly). One of the reasons why it didn't happen is that since there is no "honors athletics" which can be graded on the 5-point scale, elite students couldn't afford the grade points to take them anyway.
- permo-w 4y ago
  If anyone had to change their definition of anything based on article headlines, the world would be an even more fucked up place
  - bogota 4y ago
    People who have different sleep schedules make the world a fucked up place?
    - permo-w 4y ago
      I'm commenting on the accuracy of article headlines and nothing more
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  My HS (early 2000s in the Midwest) started at 7:0x through the years, I remember 7:04 and 7:07 start times. It was all about “minutes of education” as that’s what the funding for schools was based on. 5 minutes between classes to hit your locker, the restroom, chat with friends, and get to your next class. They were such jerks about it that they’d literally lock the doors to the classrooms the second the bell rang, then do hall sweeps with the security guards and anyone who didn’t get into a classroom got automatic detention. If that happened 3 times in a school year, you’d get a week suspension and your parents would have to come in and talk to one of the vice principals.
  - saghm 4y ago
    > They were such jerks about it that they’d literally lock the doors to the classrooms the second the bell rang, then do hall sweeps with the security guards and anyone who didn’t get into a classroom got automatic detention. They wouldn't lock the door at my school, but teachers would generally give you detention when you arrived late. Teachers would also take it personally if you didn't have the textbook for their class with you despite there not being nearly enough time to get to your locker and back. Add to that the fact that teachers often would still be trying to finish things up when the bell rang and wouldn't let us leave, and we'd end up with the perfect storm of being forced to strain to carry all of the textbooks for most of the day just to avoid detention but then end up still being late due to not being let out on time and having to walk slowly because of the said textbooks. And then they'd occasionally lecture us for ruining our posture with our heavy bags like we had any control over the situation...
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I'm more interested into what kind of school starts at 7:17?! I mean... 7am, I get... 7:17?! Did someone throw the dart at the clock and hit the 17 minute mark?
  - andreareina 4y ago
    Probably something like 7:00-:15 assembly, +:02 for moving time
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      I never had anything not aligned to '5' minute intervals (5 minutes breaks minimum between classes, and one or two longer one, 15, 25 minutes). At college, everything was 15 past full hour, for 45 minutes, then 15 minute break.
- EvgeniyZh 4y ago
  Idk, it is a matter of preference. I was hard for me to get up for school because I went to sleep late, because I didn't care enough about school. If the school started (and ended) later, then I'd to sleep even later. What mostly matters after all is the number of hours you slept. When I got to the army I needed to constantly get up at around 0530. What I found out is that it's not a problem for me (and I firmly believed it would be nearly impossible) if I go to sleep early enough. It worked for most of people around me as well. Since then I don't think getting up earlier or later really matters, I decide it based on the stuff I want to do and not the other way around.
- preisschild 4y ago
  While in our high-school equivalent in Austria I had to be at school at 7:50. This was very unfortunate as I lived in another state and had to sit 2 hours in public transit, so I had to wake up at 5:45. I remember almost sleeping after lunch and not learning anything because I was too tired. This stuff should be fixed everywhere. Getting up this early is not helpful.
- bmitc 4y ago
  I gasped at the 7:17am opening class time. That's absurd. I think mine was something like 8-8:30am, and even that was hell. It would even be absolute hell now as an adult. I honestly think our schools are a generally a massive waste of time and money, as they are now. Meaning, they meed to i prove. They have basically become daycare centers. The education is really not good, and no one is learning anything. Then you graduate only to be greeted with the basically mandatory acceptance of debt and another four years of extended high school or a lifetime of labor jobs.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  Exactly. Even these times are absurd. When did this bullshit begin, anyway? My elementary school started at 9. I don't remember when junior high started, but high school was 8:40 I think for homeroom. Then school ended at 3. If kids are starting school at 7, when does their day end? What excuse are schools giving for this?
robswc 4y ago
I get it... at the same time though, sure it was hard to wake up in the morning but that's because I would be up till 12 am playing video games, lol. I can easily see tons of kids going "oh now I can stay up till 1-2 am" and as someone that is currently struggling to actually fix my sleep schedule after going WFH, its hard to stay on track. Despite all that though, I do hope this shows potential or at least reveals new information.
- sperm 4y ago
  At least it offers the hope of getting up when there's daylight out. Getting up in the dark is so much harder.
  - robswc 4y ago
    I can agree with this. I did always find it a bit jarring that I had to wake up before the sun was even out, lol. Thinking about it now you raise a good point. Haven't woken up that early in years. I find it 100x easier to wake up when I have the blinds open to hit me in the morning.
- grapeskin 4y ago
  There’s been research that shows teens have something like a shifted biological clock. Even before the era of late night multiplayer games and browsing the Facespace and instatoks, teens were staying up, partying or prowling the streets. It’s been a stereotype since the dawn of time that teens go out late at night and are up to no good.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Really? That sounds pretty unlikely with agricultural societies getting up at 5, or safe before, say, the 1900s in most countries.
    - crooked-v 4y ago
      Society has always done plenty of things that are hugely unfriendly to basic human nature. Historically it's often been out of necessity, but fortunately we're well-off enough now as a group to afford changing that.
JaceLightning 4y ago
This is the dumbest thing I ever heard. Just like daylight saving time. You can't make teenagers sleep more by changing the number on the clock.
- blowski 4y ago
  From the article, I don't think they're forcing them to sleep more, but giving them the option by starting school later.
  - JaceLightning 4y ago
    From the article: > Adolescents in the U.S. are chronically sleep-deprived, in part because most schools start too early. The goal of changing the start time is to allow students to sleep more. But changing the number on the clock doesn't mean students will sleep more. Allowing students to start at 8am instead of 7am will just mean they go to bed and hour later because teenagers are terrible about going to bed on time.
    - blowski 4y ago
      You're massively over-generalising there. Some will do that, sure. But this should make it better for some teenagers, without making it worse for others. That sounds like a good solution.
    - itronitron 4y ago
      They should just schedule one third of the classes to be online and from midnight to 2am.
    - thewebcount 4y ago
      > changing the number on the clock doesn't mean students will sleep more They aren’t changing the number on the clock like Daylight Saving Time did. They’re changing when you are required to arrive. They number on the clocks are staying fixed and that’s why it’s more likely to help.
- ironmagma 4y ago
phamilton 4y ago
7:30am class was only part of the problem. Sports practice before school (that would need to conclude before 7:30am class) meant I woke up at 5am for much of my high school years.
normac2 4y ago
Seems like this could create a group of kids who were formerly driven to school and live out of schoolbus range, but their parents go to work too early to be able to drive them now. I wonder if there are provisions for this in the new plan (e.g., the school opens early for kids to just hang around if they still need to be dropped off early).
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  It is really unfortunate that we have created a society and physical landscape where children cannot get to school on their own. In 1969, 48% of children walked or biked to school. In 2009 that figure is 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_walking_and_bicycling.cfm http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_... Even if you happen to live close enough to a school and the walking environment is safe, it‘s not unheard of for Child Protective Services to be called on parents for letting their children be autonomous. And with the decline in routine physical activity we are now generally less healthy.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    We need penalties for these nosy people who call Child Protective Services when there is clearly no danger to the child. In some states, you can get in serious trouble (jail time) for abusing E-911 service, why can't people get in trouble for falsely reporting a child who they know is not in danger? The trick is how do you define "clearly"? I'd at least expect a caller to be able to articulate a specific danger they observed the child was in (someone following them or the child was not dressed for the weather, and so on). Not just "he's alone therefore help".
- sigstoat 4y ago
  every school i attended was open well in advance of the start of classes so as to serve breakfast to kids who ate it there. at the elementary school level there were even some enrichment programs beforehand. even if some kids still have to wake up early, they can benefit from not having to have to take tests until a bit later in the morning.
rapht 4y ago
Yeah well... or just have parents requiring lights and phone off at 9pm.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Principal Skinner: “Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.”
- dylanz 4y ago
  Lights off at 9pm? That’s not how most teenagers work. I used to read until midnight most nights.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    My kids haven’t yet wondered how the Kindles they hide under their pillows have never run out of charge.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Given the evidence pointing at teenagers having a different biological clock, that just gets you a bunch of insomniacs sneaking out anyway.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  You’re right but no one wants to admit it. It’s just like how computers have become orders of magnitude faster over the years, yet end users feel none of it because we use every new cycle we can squeeze out. Likewise, if you give kids more hours, they’ll fill them with more extracurriculars or computer time.
  - 0des 4y ago
    wow those electron guys really did a number on your comment here.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  Yeah, like that would work. My parents weren’t completely unreasonable about bedtimes but did require us to go to bed by something like 10 or 11PM so we didn’t keep them up all night with our noise. I would then lie in bed staring at the ceiling until I fell asleep at 2AM. Nothing I was able to do would help me fall asleep sooner. Then I’d just barely wake up at 6AM and drag my ass into the shower. I’d basically sleep through first and second hour. Our lunch started at something ridiculous like 10AM. My body couldn’t make heads or tails of it and my circadian rhythms were totally fucked for the next 4 to 8 years. Luckily I have a sane job now and haven’t set an alarm in about 20 years.
copperx 4y ago
My high school started at 8:30 twenty years ago, and it was hell waking up to be there on time. Cut a period and let kids go in at 10am. 9:30am at the earliest. This, of course, will never happen. Even if it did happen, school at 10 implies that kids will wake up at 9 or earlier, which is still torturous.
- munchenphile 4y ago
  School start is really bounded by the start of the average parent’s workday, unfortunately. Mom and Dad start work at 9 am. Kids need to be at school before then. None of this 10 am start talk makes sense for the kids that aren’t on the bus line and have parents that drive them to school.
  - Siira 4y ago
    They could make the first period an optional free study session. This problem is not that difficult.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    It is also bounded in the other end by sports. If your school day goes too late, you won’t have time in the afternoon/evening for sports practices. So, if you still need X hours for classes, you’ll need to start early enough to get over in time for 1-1.5 hour practices. (It also applies to other extracurricular sports, but I doubt anyone really worries about play practice schedules)
    - munchenphile 4y ago
      Well, even in a world where theater is taken as seriously as sport, at least you can do theater indoors at all hours. You can’t really play soccer after dusk if the field is outside and you don’t have lights. So lots of outdoor sports have strict daylight constraints.
    - GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
      Remove the sports, can do that on the weekend
rr808 4y ago
So they start later, do they finish later too? So have dinner later, homework later, go to be later and same result?
theptip 4y ago
> That’s profoundly unsettling, particularly in light of data released by the CDC in April showing that 44 percent of high schoolers said they’d had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” during the past year, and 20 percent had seriously contemplated suicide. One second-order effect of Covid is that it completely confounds the statistics collection for a wide swathe of issues. With a huge one-off exogenous shock in emotional and physical well-being, it’s basically impossible to make inferences using these statistics from the last couple years. Maybe we can compute the “Covid baseline impact” but because of the very regional response, it will be extremely hard to control for this factor.
- dbavaria 4y ago
  The CDC also has numbers from 2009-2019, the following report shows similiarly shocking numbers pre-covid: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:text=More%20than%201%20in%203,a%2044%25%20increase%20since%202009 https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:....
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  This is ridiculous. The CDC doesn’t care about teenagers’ mental health. They’re using this specific effect as an argument for something they actually care about. School is itself deleterious to teenagers’ mental health. School causes suicide. This is as you would expect from an institution that constrains them from doing what they want and following their interests, that is hostile to their autonomy as such. > What sticks out is a large decrease in teen suicide rates during the summer vacation months of June/July/August. In contrast, the somewhat older group sees, if anything, an increase in suicide rates in the summer. There’s also a drop in high school suicides in December, around winter vacation. https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide.html https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide...
jxf 4y ago
Thank goodness. May this herald the beginning of an era of sensible public school policies. We don't need to be making the lives of teens harder than they already are.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  My city did this last year. It...sort of worked. For the responsible kids who didn't have problems before, they continued to do well, perhaps even improving. Unfortunately, what we found was many kids, seeing that they got to "sleep in" every day, stayed up later, thus erasing the benefit. And there were knock-on effects - due to bussing needs, they changed the elementary schools to start earlier. This meant they got out earlier, which meant they got home earlier...but suddenly the HS students who were built-in babysitters were not there as they were still in school, so working parents had to pay for child care or rely on after-school programs that may not meet parents expectations. Also, teenagers who held after-school jobs, either to help the family or help themselves, found they not longer had the time to work, what with getting out later, homework, etc.
logicalmonster 4y ago
My overall opinion on this is mixed. > The Good: I think even mentioning the lack of sleep for kids as a problem is a good first step. As far as physical health, learning, and daily mood goes, good sleep is a really big part of the equation. > The Bad: Despite having a later wakeup time, I think most teens probably will not get a whole lot of extra sleep. Kids are kids and will stay up later to play games, watch movies, or do whatever else they love to do knowing that they have more time to sleep in. > The Ugly: I think acknowledging the mental health crises among many kids is a good step, but I don't think you're going to really fix anybody who might be in a danger zone by telling them that they have the option to wake up a bit later. I sincerely doubt that a sleep deficit is the issue that inspires extremely negative life-threatening behavior among anybody. PS: As a practical matter, was it mentioned in this article if ending times for schools were changed by this new policy? If it was, I didn't notice it, and that's what I wanted to see mentioned here. I'm just thinking about my own past experience, but if school begins say an hour later but also ends an hour later, I'm not sure that would have been a net benefit to school-aged me. It would have been very difficult for me to get all the way out to my soccer practice or work my part-time, after-school job if the school's ending time was pushed back.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Teenagers wanting to stay up late is natural, not the product of some social evil but a built in feature of being a teenager.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Less of a feature and more of a "known issue". A known issue that I'm still trying to sort out in my 30s.
- walkhour 4y ago
  > Despite having a later wakeup time, I think most teens will probably not get a whole lot of extra sleep. Kids are kids and will stay up later to play games ... This needn't be true, the natural time for teens to go to sleep is 10-11pm [0]. So at this time they may feel tired, and go to sleep. [0] https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/sleep-and-teens https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/sleep-and-teens
inglor_cz 4y ago
I wonder how much of this problem is caused by our sedentary lifestyles. I am a bit of a night owl myself, but I sleep much more soundly if I have a lot of physical activity across the day. If I walk 20 000 steps and spend an hour in the gym, I have no trouble falling asleep. Teenagers being the bombs of energy that they are, might need some 5-6 hours of physical activity to actually tire and sleep well. But a typical highschooler sits most of the day on his/her ass.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Personal anecdote but I was extremely active in high school, playing football, mountain biking 20-40 miles every week, and working an outdoor job, and it was a nightmare to wake up for my 9:15am classes. High school for me was 1999-2003 so I didn't spent a whole lot of time on the computer, which was in my older brother's room.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Individual and age based preferences for early or late sleeping schedules have been observed in modern day hunter gatherer tribes. It is highly doubtful that this has anything to do with modern lifestyles instead it is a feature of humanity. The concept that everyone should keep the same sleep schedule and at that an early rising one is the product of the industrial revolution and Protestant work ethic in the west. It is unnatural.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    "It is unnatural." Most of our lifestyle is unnatural (we live very differently from the original hunters and gatherers), but we could often find ways how to adapt without causing too much suffering. If teenagers suffer, I would look at various methods how to mitigate their suffering. Starting the school later is an obvious quick patch, but we shouldn't ignore other problems, such as quality of sleep in general. Not least because some of the problems may persist indefinitely. Having not enough physical activity is, in my opinion, a contributing factor, though not probably an overwhelming one.
danschumann 4y ago
The later they start, then the less time they'll have to get in trouble after school. Basically no one gets in trouble BEFORE school, right? Oh wait.. I got suspended once before school. Is there any studies on whether or not people are more likely to get in trouble based on time of day?
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Afternoon rush hour tends to be worst than morning rush hour since more people leave at the end of the workday at the same time than arrive at the start of the workday. For schools, does letting everyone out at the same time create more opportunities for conflict and trouble? Or does the before school period that's usually unstructured allow more due to how little supervision there is? For my schooling, I remember far more after school conflict, most arising from events during the school day. Kids tend to forget grudges much easier than adults so maybe in the morning they're not as upset at the insult they heard from a classmate as they were the previous afternoon.
- standardUser 4y ago
  If we want kids to get into less trouble, let's just recategorize a lot of the mostly-harmless behaviors that we consider to be "trouble".
c22 4y ago
Schools should have overlapping morning and evening periods and families should get to choose which one their student attends.
- mbreese 4y ago
  Tha doesn’t always work. The school I was supposed to go to for high school (before moving prior to the year starting) did that by default. Grades 11-12 started early and got out early. Grades 9-10 started later and ended later. There were about 3 hours of overlap.
  - leksak 4y ago
    I think the comment you are replying to would suggest that for every kid that choice gets to be made by their parent(a) /guardian as to whether or not they start late or early.
    - mbreese 4y ago
      I was trying to give a counter point about that type of flex schedule already happening at some schools. But it isn’t based on parental choice. It’s a hard thing to do in practice. You can’t have 1/3 a 1/2 of the classes duplicated throughout the day. Are you going to have two honors chemistry classes? Not all of the classes could be offered in that core set of hours when everyone was there. Or are you only going to have electives in the morning and afternoon hours? It worked for the larger school because the classes were split by grade. So you didn’t have two freshman English classes. You had freshman in the afternoon and seniors in the morning. The real problem is now instead of covering 6-7 hours of classes, teachers would need to cover 9-10 hours. You aren’t going to hire more teachers to do this. Is the Economics teacher going to only have classes from 7-10 and then 1-4? The more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems.
      - c22 4y ago
        Why can't we hire more teachers?
maerF0x0 4y ago
This is exacerbated by an unproductive amount of both homework and screen time. Getting up approximately at sunrise should be fine most people assuming they have many of the other factors in place like a wind down period, screen time cut off, dark room, low or soothing sounds, good temperature etc. However I cant imagine that for many kids they have all these in place, and Id find it hard to believe that anything a high school maybe trying to teach them today is going to be more lifelong value than maximizing their physical/brain development (until 25!) and learning good sleep hygiene.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > Getting up approximately at sunrise should be fine What, 4am?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  When your physiology wants you to wake up varies by age and by individual. It isn’t just a matter of sleep hygiene.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Hmm, mentioning that sunrise is at 4am gets downvoted. I have to assume you live in the south.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fortran77 4y ago
Kids who are early risers will suffer.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Will they, or will they have a lot of free time in the morning? Time they could even spend doing homework, giving them their evenings free and clear. edit: as an early riser myself, that absolutely doesn't mean that I want to go in early. I enjoy having hours to myself in the morning, being able to relax, cook a nice breakfast, maybe watch a movie, before going in. I don't know why it has to be the standard that we be in a frustrated hurry every morning.
cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
For grades 3 - 5, forced busing 90 minutes each way in California to the bad part of town because of skin color required waking up at 4:55 am every morning. Didn't get home until late evening. If I was any other ethnicity, I wouldn't have been required to be subjected to a worse and more dangerous school. Middle school (grades 6-8) were waking up at 6:30 am to be there by 7:30. And then high school (grades 9-12) was waking-up at 7 am to arrive by 8. 20 minute bike ride each way. Kicker: I had undiagnosed sleep apnea, ADHD, anxiety, and depression.
lumost 4y ago
I really don't understand the pressure to start schools so early, it seems contrary to the goals of both children and parents. A parent needs their kids to be supervised until they come home from work. Kids need to get sleep. Schools are presently time shifted between 2and 3 hours early relative to parental schedules. My only question is why? School could start 3 hours later and kids would get out roughly at the time their parents are coming home from work.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Places where schools start early also may be places where work starts early. For example, I live in Calgary. My high school started at 8 and many kids got there at 7:30. Work in Calgary also starts at 8ish in my experience. Toronto's public school board opens for 8:30 and classes start at 8:50. Work starts at 9 in Toronto.
  - lumost 4y ago
    This may be a Canadian thing. where I went to school in Connecticut, school began at 7:15 AM with the first busses arriving at 6:30 AM. A non trivial portion of students had to be out of the house by 5:30 AM to make the bus. Work on the other hand started at 9-9:30AM. While I didn't experience this directly, my mother must have had the brutal schedule of being up at 5 AM and arriving home at 6 PM.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  the supervision argument has always been strange to me because after school you have gaggles of unsupervised children who have maybe a 2-3 hour gap between the school day ending and their parents getting home. are kids dying in droves between 3 pm and 5:30?
throwaway_coin 4y ago
I didn't have time to sleep. I was in AP Classes, plus working 35 hours a week. In hindsight, I would have filed for emancipation and started freelancing immediately. High school is a waste of time.
tontonius 4y ago
I recommend reading Matthew Walker’s “Why we sleep”. Needles to say, as a sleep researcher, he’s a big proponent of schools starting later for kids and youth in the formative years. Especially to make room for the “late morning REM” sleep that appears to be very important for young humans with developing brains.
- JonoBB 4y ago
  Some (quite a bit) of this book has been debunked. See https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ (For the record, I don't disagree with the premise that sleeping patterns do change during the teenage years)
  - hazything 4y ago
    Can I ask why this was down voted? Looking at the linked article the author, while not a scientist in the field, seems to base his claims on reputable scientific research.
stevenpetryk 4y ago
That's amazing. My high school started at 7:05. By senior year, I began systematically missing first period because I just couldn't get up and ready on time without feeling terrible.
joe__f 4y ago
In the UK it's normal for schools to start around 9am. I thought this was some kind of avant gate experiment letting teens start at 11am, I would've loved that at 15. I didn't realise schools started so early in the states, 7am seems pretty sadistic to me
- warning26 4y ago
  It's because surburban parents demand these early start times so they can drop their kids off while commuting to work. A ridiculous justification, of course, but that's what you get with a combination of helicopter parenting and a society overreliant on cars.
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    I had always heard the explanation that early HS start times were to allow the possibility of an after-school job. Not sure which is true.
  - Thlom 4y ago
    I get it for kids younger than 8-10 (depending on the kid), but after that age kids should be able to get out of the house and to school on their own. For the youngest it can be solved with a before school program. The kids just need a place to eat breakfast and chill with their friends before the school day starts.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Letting a child under 18 step outside without being in a car or under direct parent supervision is child abuse in the US and the police will usually be called.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        As a non-American I can't tell whether this is sarcasm.
ruffrey 4y ago
I recall simply being unable to wake up for first period at 8am most days, in late high school. Waking was painful and nothing felt better than sleep. However at night, despite efforts at good sleep hygiene and consultation from a counselor, i couldn’t get to sleep before 11 or later. My grades and mood suffered greatly, as did the relationship with my poor mother. She battled with me day after day, first thing in the morning, to go to school. The first few years of college I did not schedule any classes before 10am and had effectively perfect attendance. Mood problems faded as soon as high school ended. Even today, in my 30s, a day or two with poor sleep will make a noticeable mood dip regardless of circumstances. But as an older adult, I naturally wake up at 6:00 every morning. It was the same for much of my childhood except a few years of high school. So perhaps this was a developmental thing.
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  Pretty much the same. It's like everything is exactly backwards. High school was brutal. I should have started school at 11 AM. Now, I absolutely get my best work done between 5 AM and noon. University labs were always 8 AM, so wasn't much of a choice to try to do later, especially in the first two or three undergrad years. Even at that age, it was still a struggle. Why not night lab? Surely there's a doctoral student willing to attend to some freshmen doing reactions at 8 PM, right?
switch007 4y ago
It’s not the state in control of when children sleep, it’s business owners. Children are dropped off at school at the time that allows the parents to get to work at the time required by their boss. And they’re picked up when their boss let’s them go. The school day (in the form of sports/clubs etc) is extended to keep up with longer working days and the second parent having to work full time instead of part time. And two parents have to work because they need the combined salary to make the mortgage work, for a home big enough for everyone. We work too long and too much for too little and if we don’t address the root causes then little is going to really change
- warning26 4y ago
  > Children are dropped off at school at the time that allows the parents to get to work at the time required by their boss. And they’re picked up when their boss let’s them go. If only there were some way for students to get to school that wasn't their parents dropping them off. Some kind of bus maybe, but for students. We could call it a "school bus" perhaps.
  - robocat 4y ago
    In Comments: Be kind. Don't be snarky. From guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    Where I live, middle school aged kids still run the risk of big trouble for being unsupervised. 6th grade starts at 11 years old. So the bus can drop them off and pick them up, but better be there when they leave and when they get home.
    - looperhacks 4y ago
      Man, living in Germany, we started walking to school or taking the bus alone on the third day of first grade (6yo)
logifail 4y ago
Our 12-year old (but turning 13 soon! :eek:) has to leave the house on foot at 6.50am at the latest for the 10min walk to the station to catch a train to school, he gets there around 7.35am and his first lesson starts at 7.50am Our 9-year old leaves on a (non-electric) scooter at 7.25am for the 10-min journey to school, he needs to be there for 7.45am Our 6-year old leaves with me either in the car at 8.25am if we're late, or 8.15am on bikes if we're early, for kindergarden. After all that, my wife gets up :)
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Sounds chaotic but kind of magical (ridiculous times excepted)
jorl17 4y ago
I think I very rarely woke up earlier than 7h30 or 8h30 as a kid. I recall school starting usually at 9am. Nowadays I struggle to get up before 10h30[1] (I set all my meetings starting at 10h30, and usually wake up 10 minutes before them -- the wonders of remote working). I have never been a morning person, and I cannot believe that there are parts of the world where children are forced to wake up so early. I'm sure it's fine for many, but it must be equally terrible for others. In my college days, classes equally started at 9h, but I almost always managed to get them later. There was this own professor who insisted on having his class tart at 8h30 which is incredibly frustrating: he was a drunkard who, in spite of being the only one to haave a class start before 9AM, was always late, and AFTER 9AM. I got up way earlier because of this garbage human. (I still very clearly hold a grudge against him, because he marked my final grade a 19.4/20; I'm sure he did it because he didn't want to give me a 20). [1] I can get up before 10h30 fine, and sometimes I get up as early as 6h30 "as needed". But it's definitely not good for me "in the long run" and renders me less productive overall. It is clear my natural rhythm is going to bed at 2h-4h and waking up at 12h-14h. Alas, I go to bed at 2h-4h and wake up 10h-12h. I suppose I'll die younger, but such is life. It's not the amount of sleep, because I've often been able to do great on just 3-5h of sleep consistently. I can sleep 5h, 10h, you name it, and it doesn't matter if I wake up early. Waking up early really ruins me.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I was never a morning person...until I chose to wake up at 5am every day. Now I'm a morning person. I think we are flexible enough to be whatever we want.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    I was never a morning person until I chose to wake up at 6AM. Then I was still not a morning person and hated the first 4 hours of the day even more. Then I went back to past 9 and was happy.
    - jolmg 4y ago
      If you normally wake up at e.g. 10, did you fall sleep 4 hours earlier than normal when trying to wake up at 6?
zahma 4y ago
Not totally a benefit. In the Midwest, if you start class at 9:30, as some middle schools do due to bussing availability, you’d get out at 4:30. In the winter, the sun has set. How horrible that is to feel like the day was spent inside a dingy and neglected building. The advantages of sleep must also be weighed against other psychological benefits.
aynyc 4y ago
This is all good and well. I had a hard time waking up in high school, but all my AP classes are in the morning 8:00-9:30ish. I didn't have a choice.
frogpelt 4y ago
Who's making all these kids stay up late?
83457 4y ago
In my area they swapped high school and middle school times to help HS teens. My 7th grader got up at 5:45am to get ready and catch bus at 6:45am.
fritztastic 4y ago
When I was in high school I went out to catch the bus around 0630, and if I didn't have some caffeine before starting the day being able to focus was nearly impossible. I could function with less sleep then, but even so mornings have always been difficult. I tend to be far more productive at night, and falling asleep is earier during the day. Perhaps someday the routines of society will be able to accomodate starting the day a little later, at least I hope so. Maybe having the first few classes be less mentally intensive. It's difficult to implement changes, though... and there is no universal solution that would work for everyone. Maybe some more flexibility so teens can choose their schedules to suit their individual routines- that would be a good starting point- or something like some light calisthenics or a little stretching before beginning the school day... I feel like it might be helpful to ask teens themselves what they think would make their ability to study more productive and it would be very interesting to know what they have to say.
xxEightyxx 4y ago
This is pretty cool and it's probably healthy. I was homeschooled my whole life with super strict parents - mom was an Olympian, and my father owned a construction company. My brother and I had to be up by 5:30AM for chores and exercising as this was also my moms routine. We were doing school work by 8:00AM with a small break around 10:30AM, then lunch at noon. After lunch, we went out to help my father build houses, then off to sports practices (typically two separate practices for two different sports) and classes at the local college. By the end of the day you're exhausted! A large part of why my parents were so strict is because we were really poor and my parents were determined to not only get out of poverty but also to teach us a good work ethic. So part of me is really biased in thinking "these kids have an easy schedule, why is it so hard for them to get going in the morning?" I wouldn't recommend my upbringing necessarily, but also can't help but wonder if kids had a stricter routine, regularly exercise, good diet, and family support if it wouldn't be slightly easier for them to start the day early. But also on the flip-side I think it's great to let them sleep in because I remember how I felt, and how my friends felt. Lastly, perhaps public education is partially at fault? Sitting in a classroom for hours every day is exhausting, so how about a more hands-on method of learning where kids actually stand at a white board and write out problems and solutions - something that might work in the lecture part of chemistry, physics, math, and perhaps other courses? - We did this in homeschool as well as at the local college I attended and it absolutely helped me wrap my head around things better! I ultimately have no dog in the fight as my family and I do our own thing, this is just my opinion.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  > why is it so hard for them to get going in the morning I get that there are a lot of valid cases where the answer is "homework", "circadian rhythms", "evolution", but... 80% of the answer here is electronics, and really just social media + smartphones. It's incredibly easy to stay up too late when you're hyperconnected and chatting with your classmates late into the night. It just wasn't even a possibility 20 years ago.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    It's natural to blame this stuff on the latest bogeyman but I doubt it has anything to do with smartphones and social media specifically. I was in school before smartphones and social media, and I just stayed up until the small hours talking on the landline. Kids and teenagers need some time to do their own thing, so given that most of the "waking hours" are filled with school and other things that we effectively force on them, of course they try to steal some hours for themselves where they can.
Bostonian 4y ago
Why shouldn't this be decided at the local level? My high school kids have responded to a later start time by going to sleep later, so I'm not sure there has been much benefit.
clarkmoody 4y ago
Instead of politicians tweaking wake up times, let's give more control to parents and students themselves by moving away from factory-model schooling.
jtdev 4y ago
rkagerer 4y ago
I managed to arrange one semester of university where I didn't have any early morning classes whatsoever. It was bliss.
incanus77 4y ago
Personal anecdote here, and I’m sure things have changed in 30 years, but I feel like it was never a problem for me to attend class starting at 8:15. I had to get up at 6 or 6:30, do outdoor chores like taking care of animals, including in the dead of winter and lots of snow, get a shower, eat a healthy breakfast, catch the bus by about 7:45, and ride in. The secret? I had an early bedtime, typically 9pm, at least to start winding down. It definitely wasn’t cool, I didn’t see the interesting late night TV shows, I didn’t go out much during the week, and I generally wasn’t allowed to do sleepovers on school nights. But I had a rich social life, friends, fun and interesting activities, and did among the best at my school. I know lots of kids who had no bedtimes or who were just in control of getting enough sleep on their own. I don’t think it worked out very well.
- iterati 4y ago
  There's a study linked in the article about how this isn't statistically how most people work. But you know, it worked for you, so let's just keep doing what we're doing.
hardwaregeek 4y ago
It's weird looking back on high school and realizing how much of it was ridiculously cruel. You'd have teachers and parents all telling you that it's your fault for not having better time management skills or executive functioning skills, all the while you're 15; you're still growing mentally and physically; you're sleep deprived as hell; and the work is just piling on, and on and on. Their advice, I kid you not, was to just squeak in work in every possible situation. On the subway? Read your assigned book. In class? Sneak in some homework. And sure, kids procrastinate. But they procrastinate because they want to have leisure and they feel absolutely no control over their lives. Good luck if you did a sport. I remember hearing some elite fencers talk and all of them said essentially "yeah...I didn't get a lot of sleep in high school". That's not some innocuous hard work ethic mindset. That's messing with a developing brain and depriving it of a necessary resource. It pisses me off that we're just realizing that this culture of torturing teenagers is maybe not the best idea.
- baron816 4y ago
  Yes, I remember it being framed as a morality issue. If you didn’t wake up early, it’s because you were lazy and irresponsible.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Of all the things wrong with public education, the time I had to get up was the least of my concerns.
dirtyid 4y ago
As a perrenial night owl, I always wish there was parallel social systems from schools to businesses to accomdate people who thrive at night. But enabling 8 hours of sleep after midnight bedtime is a start.
brailsafe 4y ago
With the kind of bullshit I learned in high school, it's almost offensive that I was expected to be there for whatever time it was.
- Aurelius3 4y ago
  Absolutely, as someone that got 10+ hours of sleep year round for multiple years in high school (early bedtime, early waking), the dread of having to sit in a class and learn horrendous nonsense was more of a motivation to sleep in then actual physical necessity. I suspect it's the case for many adolescents who see little value in secondary courses.
kabes 4y ago
In belgium my school started around 8.30, which meant getting up at 7.30 in my case. I always had a very hard time waking up and was often tired during the day. However in summer, time in Belgium is 2 hours ahead of what's considered 'natural time'. In winter, with DST only 1. Summer or winter, I was always just as tired. Now I need to wake up at around 8.30 for work. I'm still just as tired, since I just go to sleep later. So I'm doubtful this will help much since in my experience the hard part is going to bed early enough.
- budoso 4y ago
  The issue with kids is theres often a lot of real problems with how they actually get to school. In the US kids will often wait anywhere from 5-20 minutes for the bus, sometimes in 0° F (-17.8° C) weather. Not to mention that waking up before the sunrise has its own issues with decreasing mood.
DocTomoe 4y ago
Hm, story time. I was attending a boarding school in the 1990s as an 'external' student (which means I lived at home and commuted in each day). They started their first period at 7:15 am, because that allowed everyone to go to mess hall at the same time during dinner. Which meant that to catch the bus, I needed to rise at 5am, showered and dressed half-dead, got into the bus at 5:45am, arrived around 6:45am, and stood another half-hour freezing. My brother, who attended another school, started at 8am, which afforded him 80 more minutes of sleep... For normal classes which I had several periods during the week, one being in the early-morning spot did not make much of a difference. Then, one year, I got my favourite subject - physics - scheduled for monday morning, 7:15am, and thursday afternoon at 4:30pm. I failed that class - in a subject in which I used to be a straight A student. The policy had other effects, too. Eventually, I went on autocontrol, getting in on bank holidays (because at 5:00, I would wake automatically, but still was too brain-fogged to realise it was not a working day) on more than one occassion. All that research about teenage circadian cycles came later - and it had absolutely no effect. My nephew is in that very school today (and thanks to my suggestion, because if you take the early rising aspect out, those were the best days of my school life). They still start at 7:15am.
csheehan10 4y ago
I find it very unconvincing that parents needing to get to work on time necessitates starting school so early. In Ireland (a country with very poor public transport) in the 2010s I started secondary school at 8.45am. This usually meant getting up about 7.45am, and being dropped to school by parents about 8.30am, so they'd have plenty of time to make it to work by 9. In what universe is making teenagers arrive in by 7am justified?
rurban 4y ago
I train a teenager who happily starts school at 8:00, but having huge troubles on the weekend to play before 11:30. Not possible even with 2 cups of strong coffee. Probably because his parties usually last until 4am on Friday and Saturday. The challenge will be to play now on the county level, because these games start at Sat 10am not Wed 5pm anymore. Troubled times for teenagers.
rurban 4y ago
The advantage of the decline of public TV is that I can get to sleep now at around 10pm, so I get up at 5:30am every day, to serve my cats. Starting work at 6:30am is a revelation. I get so much more done in the morning, without any interruptions.

tailspin2019 4y ago

> Terra Ziporyn Snider of Severna Park, Maryland, still remembers how difficult it was for her son to wake up for his 7:17 a.m. first-period class… > That’s about to change in California, when a law—the first of its kind in the nation—goes into effect on July 1 requiring the state’s public high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., and its middle schools no earlier than 8 a.m. Wow. I may need to reassess my definition of “sleeping in”. (Spoken as someone who had incredible difficulty getting to school by 8.50am back in the day and who hasn’t gotten up before 10.30am in the last week!)

mod 4y ago
I had to get up at 5:30AM in high school to catch the bus in time. My bus ride was 45 minutes, and I was the first pickup. In the afternoon, I was the last dropoff, which I thought was grossly unfair.
- input_sh 4y ago
  Hah, same for 3/4 years of my high school! I've managed to train myself to fall asleep on the way back and wake up when the noise in the bus quiets down, in between the second to last and my stop.
MarcScott 4y ago
When I was teaching, I'd get into school for about 7:15am (so wake up at about 5am), so I could make sure I was prepared for my lessons that day. My first class was never before 9am, and school ended at 3:30pm. I just couldn't have coped classes starting that early.
- bonzini 4y ago
  What did you do for two hours fifteen minutes?
  - MarcScott 4y ago
    - Write lesson plans for the department. - Prepare materials for students to work on. - Mark students' work. - Write assessment reports on students for parents. - Write department action plans. - Complete SEN reports on selected students. - Complete CPD in electronics and CS to upskill in the subjects I taught. - Prototype new projects that the students would engage with in the future. I could go on. For about every hour I spent actually teaching in a classroom, there was half an hour spent planning, assessing or completing admin work. I regularly worked 12 hour days, plus weekends, and all those long holiday that we were supposed to get.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      I was talking specifically of the morning.
      - filleduchaos 4y ago
        Personally, nothing about the answer implies that the given list was not tackled in the morning.
        bonzini 4y ago
        It also didn't include anything that had to be done in the morning such as commuting. I am not suggesting that school should start at 7:15 but, if school began and ended earlier, all of those activities could be moved after school ended (possibly to the previous day).
      - MarcScott 4y ago
        That was my morning, my evenings, my weekends and my "holidays". I could have added more to the list. Teaching is not about babysitting kids for 60 minutes while you scroll though a PowerPoint.
messe 4y ago
Ireland here. My school (which thought entirely through Irish, aside from English lessons, obviously, advertised itself as starting and finishing early, and it started at 08:30 as well.
dgfitz 4y ago
I went to a high school in the same district as this one, 7:17 am was absolutely brutal. I had it timed down to the minute so I could sleep as long as possible and not be late once I started driving myself.
yashap 4y ago
Yeah, my high school started at 8:50 am too, and that still felt too early. This article mentioned that Seattle high schools used to start at 7:50 am, that seems absolutely nuts. I’d peg roughly 9:30 am as a good time for high schools to start.
codefreeordie 4y ago
Does that law account for "zero period"? From my quick reading of the bill, I think it does not -- so probably not that much will actually change. School may start at 8:30, but zero period will still start around 7:30, and some schools might create a double-zero to go earlier still. It is absurd how early schools start. Objectively, there was no good reason why I had to be on my spot on the field at 7:08a every morning only to be done by 2:50p.
- mdouglass 4y ago
  The law does actually - you can have zero period but it can’t count towards the instructional time required for students. It’s actually deeply annoying for my daughter’s high school. It already started 1st period at 830, but since 0 period no longer “counts”, the day is getting extended by almost an hour for all students. This is from an email from our district earlier in the year: The exceptions to this are zero period classes. Since zero period classes are optional and not required, these classes may begin before 8:30 AM; they just cannot be used to meet the instructional minute's requirements of 64,800 annual schoolwide instructional minutes
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  What is zero period?
  - codefreeordie 4y ago
    The period before 1st period. 1st period being the first "official" period of the day, which now can't begin before 8:30a. Originally, it began life as the before-school time for athletics and other organized extra-curriculars, but once it existed, it became a full-fledged period of instruction, as high-achieving students needed to cram ever more "elective" courses in order to compete for the top university slots. Even 25 years ago when I was in high school, there was talk of creating a double-zero for the athletics, the marching band, and the extra-curriculars, so that elite students could "still afford" to do them. In my district, it didn't happen (With zero starting at 7:08a, double-zero would have been 6:03a, if I'm remembering class length correctly). One of the reasons why it didn't happen is that since there is no "honors athletics" which can be graded on the 5-point scale, elite students couldn't afford the grade points to take them anyway.
permo-w 4y ago
If anyone had to change their definition of anything based on article headlines, the world would be an even more fucked up place
- bogota 4y ago
  People who have different sleep schedules make the world a fucked up place?
  - permo-w 4y ago
    I'm commenting on the accuracy of article headlines and nothing more
seanp2k2 4y ago
My HS (early 2000s in the Midwest) started at 7:0x through the years, I remember 7:04 and 7:07 start times. It was all about “minutes of education” as that’s what the funding for schools was based on. 5 minutes between classes to hit your locker, the restroom, chat with friends, and get to your next class. They were such jerks about it that they’d literally lock the doors to the classrooms the second the bell rang, then do hall sweeps with the security guards and anyone who didn’t get into a classroom got automatic detention. If that happened 3 times in a school year, you’d get a week suspension and your parents would have to come in and talk to one of the vice principals.
- saghm 4y ago
  > They were such jerks about it that they’d literally lock the doors to the classrooms the second the bell rang, then do hall sweeps with the security guards and anyone who didn’t get into a classroom got automatic detention. They wouldn't lock the door at my school, but teachers would generally give you detention when you arrived late. Teachers would also take it personally if you didn't have the textbook for their class with you despite there not being nearly enough time to get to your locker and back. Add to that the fact that teachers often would still be trying to finish things up when the bell rang and wouldn't let us leave, and we'd end up with the perfect storm of being forced to strain to carry all of the textbooks for most of the day just to avoid detention but then end up still being late due to not being let out on time and having to walk slowly because of the said textbooks. And then they'd occasionally lecture us for ruining our posture with our heavy bags like we had any control over the situation...
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I'm more interested into what kind of school starts at 7:17?! I mean... 7am, I get... 7:17?! Did someone throw the dart at the clock and hit the 17 minute mark?
- andreareina 4y ago
  Probably something like 7:00-:15 assembly, +:02 for moving time
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    I never had anything not aligned to '5' minute intervals (5 minutes breaks minimum between classes, and one or two longer one, 15, 25 minutes). At college, everything was 15 past full hour, for 45 minutes, then 15 minute break.
EvgeniyZh 4y ago
Idk, it is a matter of preference. I was hard for me to get up for school because I went to sleep late, because I didn't care enough about school. If the school started (and ended) later, then I'd to sleep even later. What mostly matters after all is the number of hours you slept. When I got to the army I needed to constantly get up at around 0530. What I found out is that it's not a problem for me (and I firmly believed it would be nearly impossible) if I go to sleep early enough. It worked for most of people around me as well. Since then I don't think getting up earlier or later really matters, I decide it based on the stuff I want to do and not the other way around.
preisschild 4y ago
While in our high-school equivalent in Austria I had to be at school at 7:50. This was very unfortunate as I lived in another state and had to sit 2 hours in public transit, so I had to wake up at 5:45. I remember almost sleeping after lunch and not learning anything because I was too tired. This stuff should be fixed everywhere. Getting up this early is not helpful.
bmitc 4y ago
I gasped at the 7:17am opening class time. That's absurd. I think mine was something like 8-8:30am, and even that was hell. It would even be absolute hell now as an adult. I honestly think our schools are a generally a massive waste of time and money, as they are now. Meaning, they meed to i prove. They have basically become daycare centers. The education is really not good, and no one is learning anything. Then you graduate only to be greeted with the basically mandatory acceptance of debt and another four years of extended high school or a lifetime of labor jobs.
NonNefarious 4y ago
Exactly. Even these times are absurd. When did this bullshit begin, anyway? My elementary school started at 9. I don't remember when junior high started, but high school was 8:40 I think for homeroom. Then school ended at 3. If kids are starting school at 7, when does their day end? What excuse are schools giving for this?

robswc 4y ago

I get it... at the same time though, sure it was hard to wake up in the morning but that's because I would be up till 12 am playing video games, lol. I can easily see tons of kids going "oh now I can stay up till 1-2 am" and as someone that is currently struggling to actually fix my sleep schedule after going WFH, its hard to stay on track. Despite all that though, I do hope this shows potential or at least reveals new information.

sperm 4y ago
At least it offers the hope of getting up when there's daylight out. Getting up in the dark is so much harder.
- robswc 4y ago
  I can agree with this. I did always find it a bit jarring that I had to wake up before the sun was even out, lol. Thinking about it now you raise a good point. Haven't woken up that early in years. I find it 100x easier to wake up when I have the blinds open to hit me in the morning.
grapeskin 4y ago
There’s been research that shows teens have something like a shifted biological clock. Even before the era of late night multiplayer games and browsing the Facespace and instatoks, teens were staying up, partying or prowling the streets. It’s been a stereotype since the dawn of time that teens go out late at night and are up to no good.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Really? That sounds pretty unlikely with agricultural societies getting up at 5, or safe before, say, the 1900s in most countries.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    Society has always done plenty of things that are hugely unfriendly to basic human nature. Historically it's often been out of necessity, but fortunately we're well-off enough now as a group to afford changing that.

JaceLightning 4y ago

This is the dumbest thing I ever heard. Just like daylight saving time. You can't make teenagers sleep more by changing the number on the clock.

blowski 4y ago
From the article, I don't think they're forcing them to sleep more, but giving them the option by starting school later.
- JaceLightning 4y ago
  From the article: > Adolescents in the U.S. are chronically sleep-deprived, in part because most schools start too early. The goal of changing the start time is to allow students to sleep more. But changing the number on the clock doesn't mean students will sleep more. Allowing students to start at 8am instead of 7am will just mean they go to bed and hour later because teenagers are terrible about going to bed on time.
  - blowski 4y ago
    You're massively over-generalising there. Some will do that, sure. But this should make it better for some teenagers, without making it worse for others. That sounds like a good solution.
  - itronitron 4y ago
    They should just schedule one third of the classes to be online and from midnight to 2am.
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    > changing the number on the clock doesn't mean students will sleep more They aren’t changing the number on the clock like Daylight Saving Time did. They’re changing when you are required to arrive. They number on the clocks are staying fixed and that’s why it’s more likely to help.
ironmagma 4y ago

phamilton 4y ago

7:30am class was only part of the problem. Sports practice before school (that would need to conclude before 7:30am class) meant I woke up at 5am for much of my high school years.

normac2 4y ago

Seems like this could create a group of kids who were formerly driven to school and live out of schoolbus range, but their parents go to work too early to be able to drive them now. I wonder if there are provisions for this in the new plan (e.g., the school opens early for kids to just hang around if they still need to be dropped off early).

bobthepanda 4y ago
It is really unfortunate that we have created a society and physical landscape where children cannot get to school on their own. In 1969, 48% of children walked or biked to school. In 2009 that figure is 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_walking_and_bicycling.cfm http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_... Even if you happen to live close enough to a school and the walking environment is safe, it‘s not unheard of for Child Protective Services to be called on parents for letting their children be autonomous. And with the decline in routine physical activity we are now generally less healthy.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  We need penalties for these nosy people who call Child Protective Services when there is clearly no danger to the child. In some states, you can get in serious trouble (jail time) for abusing E-911 service, why can't people get in trouble for falsely reporting a child who they know is not in danger? The trick is how do you define "clearly"? I'd at least expect a caller to be able to articulate a specific danger they observed the child was in (someone following them or the child was not dressed for the weather, and so on). Not just "he's alone therefore help".
sigstoat 4y ago
every school i attended was open well in advance of the start of classes so as to serve breakfast to kids who ate it there. at the elementary school level there were even some enrichment programs beforehand. even if some kids still have to wake up early, they can benefit from not having to have to take tests until a bit later in the morning.

rapht 4y ago

Yeah well... or just have parents requiring lights and phone off at 9pm.

ceejayoz 4y ago
Principal Skinner: “Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.”
dylanz 4y ago
Lights off at 9pm? That’s not how most teenagers work. I used to read until midnight most nights.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  My kids haven’t yet wondered how the Kindles they hide under their pillows have never run out of charge.
crooked-v 4y ago
Given the evidence pointing at teenagers having a different biological clock, that just gets you a bunch of insomniacs sneaking out anyway.
jimbob45 4y ago
You’re right but no one wants to admit it. It’s just like how computers have become orders of magnitude faster over the years, yet end users feel none of it because we use every new cycle we can squeeze out. Likewise, if you give kids more hours, they’ll fill them with more extracurriculars or computer time.
- 0des 4y ago
  wow those electron guys really did a number on your comment here.
thewebcount 4y ago
Yeah, like that would work. My parents weren’t completely unreasonable about bedtimes but did require us to go to bed by something like 10 or 11PM so we didn’t keep them up all night with our noise. I would then lie in bed staring at the ceiling until I fell asleep at 2AM. Nothing I was able to do would help me fall asleep sooner. Then I’d just barely wake up at 6AM and drag my ass into the shower. I’d basically sleep through first and second hour. Our lunch started at something ridiculous like 10AM. My body couldn’t make heads or tails of it and my circadian rhythms were totally fucked for the next 4 to 8 years. Luckily I have a sane job now and haven’t set an alarm in about 20 years.

copperx 4y ago

My high school started at 8:30 twenty years ago, and it was hell waking up to be there on time. Cut a period and let kids go in at 10am. 9:30am at the earliest. This, of course, will never happen. Even if it did happen, school at 10 implies that kids will wake up at 9 or earlier, which is still torturous.

munchenphile 4y ago
School start is really bounded by the start of the average parent’s workday, unfortunately. Mom and Dad start work at 9 am. Kids need to be at school before then. None of this 10 am start talk makes sense for the kids that aren’t on the bus line and have parents that drive them to school.
- Siira 4y ago
  They could make the first period an optional free study session. This problem is not that difficult.
- mbreese 4y ago
  It is also bounded in the other end by sports. If your school day goes too late, you won’t have time in the afternoon/evening for sports practices. So, if you still need X hours for classes, you’ll need to start early enough to get over in time for 1-1.5 hour practices. (It also applies to other extracurricular sports, but I doubt anyone really worries about play practice schedules)
  - munchenphile 4y ago
    Well, even in a world where theater is taken as seriously as sport, at least you can do theater indoors at all hours. You can’t really play soccer after dusk if the field is outside and you don’t have lights. So lots of outdoor sports have strict daylight constraints.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
    Remove the sports, can do that on the weekend

rr808 4y ago

So they start later, do they finish later too? So have dinner later, homework later, go to be later and same result?

theptip 4y ago

> That’s profoundly unsettling, particularly in light of data released by the CDC in April showing that 44 percent of high schoolers said they’d had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” during the past year, and 20 percent had seriously contemplated suicide. One second-order effect of Covid is that it completely confounds the statistics collection for a wide swathe of issues. With a huge one-off exogenous shock in emotional and physical well-being, it’s basically impossible to make inferences using these statistics from the last couple years. Maybe we can compute the “Covid baseline impact” but because of the very regional response, it will be extremely hard to control for this factor.

dbavaria 4y ago
The CDC also has numbers from 2009-2019, the following report shows similiarly shocking numbers pre-covid: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:text=More%20than%201%20in%203,a%2044%25%20increase%20since%202009 https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:....
barry-cotter 4y ago
This is ridiculous. The CDC doesn’t care about teenagers’ mental health. They’re using this specific effect as an argument for something they actually care about. School is itself deleterious to teenagers’ mental health. School causes suicide. This is as you would expect from an institution that constrains them from doing what they want and following their interests, that is hostile to their autonomy as such. > What sticks out is a large decrease in teen suicide rates during the summer vacation months of June/July/August. In contrast, the somewhat older group sees, if anything, an increase in suicide rates in the summer. There’s also a drop in high school suicides in December, around winter vacation. https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide.html https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide...

jxf 4y ago

Thank goodness. May this herald the beginning of an era of sensible public school policies. We don't need to be making the lives of teens harder than they already are.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
My city did this last year. It...sort of worked. For the responsible kids who didn't have problems before, they continued to do well, perhaps even improving. Unfortunately, what we found was many kids, seeing that they got to "sleep in" every day, stayed up later, thus erasing the benefit. And there were knock-on effects - due to bussing needs, they changed the elementary schools to start earlier. This meant they got out earlier, which meant they got home earlier...but suddenly the HS students who were built-in babysitters were not there as they were still in school, so working parents had to pay for child care or rely on after-school programs that may not meet parents expectations. Also, teenagers who held after-school jobs, either to help the family or help themselves, found they not longer had the time to work, what with getting out later, homework, etc.

logicalmonster 4y ago

My overall opinion on this is mixed. > The Good: I think even mentioning the lack of sleep for kids as a problem is a good first step. As far as physical health, learning, and daily mood goes, good sleep is a really big part of the equation. > The Bad: Despite having a later wakeup time, I think most teens probably will not get a whole lot of extra sleep. Kids are kids and will stay up later to play games, watch movies, or do whatever else they love to do knowing that they have more time to sleep in. > The Ugly: I think acknowledging the mental health crises among many kids is a good step, but I don't think you're going to really fix anybody who might be in a danger zone by telling them that they have the option to wake up a bit later. I sincerely doubt that a sleep deficit is the issue that inspires extremely negative life-threatening behavior among anybody. PS: As a practical matter, was it mentioned in this article if ending times for schools were changed by this new policy? If it was, I didn't notice it, and that's what I wanted to see mentioned here. I'm just thinking about my own past experience, but if school begins say an hour later but also ends an hour later, I'm not sure that would have been a net benefit to school-aged me. It would have been very difficult for me to get all the way out to my soccer practice or work my part-time, after-school job if the school's ending time was pushed back.

colechristensen 4y ago
Teenagers wanting to stay up late is natural, not the product of some social evil but a built in feature of being a teenager.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Less of a feature and more of a "known issue". A known issue that I'm still trying to sort out in my 30s.
walkhour 4y ago
> Despite having a later wakeup time, I think most teens will probably not get a whole lot of extra sleep. Kids are kids and will stay up later to play games ... This needn't be true, the natural time for teens to go to sleep is 10-11pm [0]. So at this time they may feel tired, and go to sleep. [0] https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/sleep-and-teens https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/sleep-and-teens

inglor_cz 4y ago

I wonder how much of this problem is caused by our sedentary lifestyles. I am a bit of a night owl myself, but I sleep much more soundly if I have a lot of physical activity across the day. If I walk 20 000 steps and spend an hour in the gym, I have no trouble falling asleep. Teenagers being the bombs of energy that they are, might need some 5-6 hours of physical activity to actually tire and sleep well. But a typical highschooler sits most of the day on his/her ass.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Personal anecdote but I was extremely active in high school, playing football, mountain biking 20-40 miles every week, and working an outdoor job, and it was a nightmare to wake up for my 9:15am classes. High school for me was 1999-2003 so I didn't spent a whole lot of time on the computer, which was in my older brother's room.
colechristensen 4y ago
Individual and age based preferences for early or late sleeping schedules have been observed in modern day hunter gatherer tribes. It is highly doubtful that this has anything to do with modern lifestyles instead it is a feature of humanity. The concept that everyone should keep the same sleep schedule and at that an early rising one is the product of the industrial revolution and Protestant work ethic in the west. It is unnatural.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  "It is unnatural." Most of our lifestyle is unnatural (we live very differently from the original hunters and gatherers), but we could often find ways how to adapt without causing too much suffering. If teenagers suffer, I would look at various methods how to mitigate their suffering. Starting the school later is an obvious quick patch, but we shouldn't ignore other problems, such as quality of sleep in general. Not least because some of the problems may persist indefinitely. Having not enough physical activity is, in my opinion, a contributing factor, though not probably an overwhelming one.

danschumann 4y ago

The later they start, then the less time they'll have to get in trouble after school. Basically no one gets in trouble BEFORE school, right? Oh wait.. I got suspended once before school. Is there any studies on whether or not people are more likely to get in trouble based on time of day?

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Afternoon rush hour tends to be worst than morning rush hour since more people leave at the end of the workday at the same time than arrive at the start of the workday. For schools, does letting everyone out at the same time create more opportunities for conflict and trouble? Or does the before school period that's usually unstructured allow more due to how little supervision there is? For my schooling, I remember far more after school conflict, most arising from events during the school day. Kids tend to forget grudges much easier than adults so maybe in the morning they're not as upset at the insult they heard from a classmate as they were the previous afternoon.
standardUser 4y ago
If we want kids to get into less trouble, let's just recategorize a lot of the mostly-harmless behaviors that we consider to be "trouble".

c22 4y ago

Schools should have overlapping morning and evening periods and families should get to choose which one their student attends.

mbreese 4y ago
Tha doesn’t always work. The school I was supposed to go to for high school (before moving prior to the year starting) did that by default. Grades 11-12 started early and got out early. Grades 9-10 started later and ended later. There were about 3 hours of overlap.
- leksak 4y ago
  I think the comment you are replying to would suggest that for every kid that choice gets to be made by their parent(a) /guardian as to whether or not they start late or early.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    I was trying to give a counter point about that type of flex schedule already happening at some schools. But it isn’t based on parental choice. It’s a hard thing to do in practice. You can’t have 1/3 a 1/2 of the classes duplicated throughout the day. Are you going to have two honors chemistry classes? Not all of the classes could be offered in that core set of hours when everyone was there. Or are you only going to have electives in the morning and afternoon hours? It worked for the larger school because the classes were split by grade. So you didn’t have two freshman English classes. You had freshman in the afternoon and seniors in the morning. The real problem is now instead of covering 6-7 hours of classes, teachers would need to cover 9-10 hours. You aren’t going to hire more teachers to do this. Is the Economics teacher going to only have classes from 7-10 and then 1-4? The more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems.
    - c22 4y ago
      Why can't we hire more teachers?

maerF0x0 4y ago

This is exacerbated by an unproductive amount of both homework and screen time. Getting up approximately at sunrise should be fine most people assuming they have many of the other factors in place like a wind down period, screen time cut off, dark room, low or soothing sounds, good temperature etc. However I cant imagine that for many kids they have all these in place, and Id find it hard to believe that anything a high school maybe trying to teach them today is going to be more lifelong value than maximizing their physical/brain development (until 25!) and learning good sleep hygiene.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
> Getting up approximately at sunrise should be fine What, 4am?
colechristensen 4y ago
When your physiology wants you to wake up varies by age and by individual. It isn’t just a matter of sleep hygiene.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Gordonjcp 4y ago
Hmm, mentioning that sunrise is at 4am gets downvoted. I have to assume you live in the south.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fortran77 4y ago

Kids who are early risers will suffer.

pessimizer 4y ago
Will they, or will they have a lot of free time in the morning? Time they could even spend doing homework, giving them their evenings free and clear. edit: as an early riser myself, that absolutely doesn't mean that I want to go in early. I enjoy having hours to myself in the morning, being able to relax, cook a nice breakfast, maybe watch a movie, before going in. I don't know why it has to be the standard that we be in a frustrated hurry every morning.

cvccvroomvroom 4y ago

For grades 3 - 5, forced busing 90 minutes each way in California to the bad part of town because of skin color required waking up at 4:55 am every morning. Didn't get home until late evening. If I was any other ethnicity, I wouldn't have been required to be subjected to a worse and more dangerous school. Middle school (grades 6-8) were waking up at 6:30 am to be there by 7:30. And then high school (grades 9-12) was waking-up at 7 am to arrive by 8. 20 minute bike ride each way. Kicker: I had undiagnosed sleep apnea, ADHD, anxiety, and depression.

lumost 4y ago

I really don't understand the pressure to start schools so early, it seems contrary to the goals of both children and parents. A parent needs their kids to be supervised until they come home from work. Kids need to get sleep. Schools are presently time shifted between 2and 3 hours early relative to parental schedules. My only question is why? School could start 3 hours later and kids would get out roughly at the time their parents are coming home from work.

MattGaiser 4y ago
Places where schools start early also may be places where work starts early. For example, I live in Calgary. My high school started at 8 and many kids got there at 7:30. Work in Calgary also starts at 8ish in my experience. Toronto's public school board opens for 8:30 and classes start at 8:50. Work starts at 9 in Toronto.
- lumost 4y ago
  This may be a Canadian thing. where I went to school in Connecticut, school began at 7:15 AM with the first busses arriving at 6:30 AM. A non trivial portion of students had to be out of the house by 5:30 AM to make the bus. Work on the other hand started at 9-9:30AM. While I didn't experience this directly, my mother must have had the brutal schedule of being up at 5 AM and arriving home at 6 PM.
odessacubbage 4y ago
the supervision argument has always been strange to me because after school you have gaggles of unsupervised children who have maybe a 2-3 hour gap between the school day ending and their parents getting home. are kids dying in droves between 3 pm and 5:30?

throwaway_coin 4y ago

I didn't have time to sleep. I was in AP Classes, plus working 35 hours a week. In hindsight, I would have filed for emancipation and started freelancing immediately. High school is a waste of time.

tontonius 4y ago

I recommend reading Matthew Walker’s “Why we sleep”. Needles to say, as a sleep researcher, he’s a big proponent of schools starting later for kids and youth in the formative years. Especially to make room for the “late morning REM” sleep that appears to be very important for young humans with developing brains.

JonoBB 4y ago
Some (quite a bit) of this book has been debunked. See https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/ (For the record, I don't disagree with the premise that sleeping patterns do change during the teenage years)
- hazything 4y ago
  Can I ask why this was down voted? Looking at the linked article the author, while not a scientist in the field, seems to base his claims on reputable scientific research.

stevenpetryk 4y ago

That's amazing. My high school started at 7:05. By senior year, I began systematically missing first period because I just couldn't get up and ready on time without feeling terrible.

joe__f 4y ago

In the UK it's normal for schools to start around 9am. I thought this was some kind of avant gate experiment letting teens start at 11am, I would've loved that at 15. I didn't realise schools started so early in the states, 7am seems pretty sadistic to me

warning26 4y ago
It's because surburban parents demand these early start times so they can drop their kids off while commuting to work. A ridiculous justification, of course, but that's what you get with a combination of helicopter parenting and a society overreliant on cars.
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  I had always heard the explanation that early HS start times were to allow the possibility of an after-school job. Not sure which is true.
- Thlom 4y ago
  I get it for kids younger than 8-10 (depending on the kid), but after that age kids should be able to get out of the house and to school on their own. For the youngest it can be solved with a before school program. The kids just need a place to eat breakfast and chill with their friends before the school day starts.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Letting a child under 18 step outside without being in a car or under direct parent supervision is child abuse in the US and the police will usually be called.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      As a non-American I can't tell whether this is sarcasm.

ruffrey 4y ago

I recall simply being unable to wake up for first period at 8am most days, in late high school. Waking was painful and nothing felt better than sleep. However at night, despite efforts at good sleep hygiene and consultation from a counselor, i couldn’t get to sleep before 11 or later. My grades and mood suffered greatly, as did the relationship with my poor mother. She battled with me day after day, first thing in the morning, to go to school. The first few years of college I did not schedule any classes before 10am and had effectively perfect attendance. Mood problems faded as soon as high school ended. Even today, in my 30s, a day or two with poor sleep will make a noticeable mood dip regardless of circumstances. But as an older adult, I naturally wake up at 6:00 every morning. It was the same for much of my childhood except a few years of high school. So perhaps this was a developmental thing.

ibejoeb 4y ago
Pretty much the same. It's like everything is exactly backwards. High school was brutal. I should have started school at 11 AM. Now, I absolutely get my best work done between 5 AM and noon. University labs were always 8 AM, so wasn't much of a choice to try to do later, especially in the first two or three undergrad years. Even at that age, it was still a struggle. Why not night lab? Surely there's a doctoral student willing to attend to some freshmen doing reactions at 8 PM, right?

switch007 4y ago

It’s not the state in control of when children sleep, it’s business owners. Children are dropped off at school at the time that allows the parents to get to work at the time required by their boss. And they’re picked up when their boss let’s them go. The school day (in the form of sports/clubs etc) is extended to keep up with longer working days and the second parent having to work full time instead of part time. And two parents have to work because they need the combined salary to make the mortgage work, for a home big enough for everyone. We work too long and too much for too little and if we don’t address the root causes then little is going to really change

warning26 4y ago
> Children are dropped off at school at the time that allows the parents to get to work at the time required by their boss. And they’re picked up when their boss let’s them go. If only there were some way for students to get to school that wasn't their parents dropping them off. Some kind of bus maybe, but for students. We could call it a "school bus" perhaps.
- robocat 4y ago
  In Comments: Be kind. Don't be snarky. From guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  Where I live, middle school aged kids still run the risk of big trouble for being unsupervised. 6th grade starts at 11 years old. So the bus can drop them off and pick them up, but better be there when they leave and when they get home.
  - looperhacks 4y ago
    Man, living in Germany, we started walking to school or taking the bus alone on the third day of first grade (6yo)

logifail 4y ago

Our 12-year old (but turning 13 soon! :eek:) has to leave the house on foot at 6.50am at the latest for the 10min walk to the station to catch a train to school, he gets there around 7.35am and his first lesson starts at 7.50am Our 9-year old leaves on a (non-electric) scooter at 7.25am for the 10-min journey to school, he needs to be there for 7.45am Our 6-year old leaves with me either in the car at 8.25am if we're late, or 8.15am on bikes if we're early, for kindergarden. After all that, my wife gets up :)

quickthrower2 4y ago
Sounds chaotic but kind of magical (ridiculous times excepted)

jorl17 4y ago

I think I very rarely woke up earlier than 7h30 or 8h30 as a kid. I recall school starting usually at 9am. Nowadays I struggle to get up before 10h30[1] (I set all my meetings starting at 10h30, and usually wake up 10 minutes before them -- the wonders of remote working). I have never been a morning person, and I cannot believe that there are parts of the world where children are forced to wake up so early. I'm sure it's fine for many, but it must be equally terrible for others. In my college days, classes equally started at 9h, but I almost always managed to get them later. There was this own professor who insisted on having his class tart at 8h30 which is incredibly frustrating: he was a drunkard who, in spite of being the only one to haave a class start before 9AM, was always late, and AFTER 9AM. I got up way earlier because of this garbage human. (I still very clearly hold a grudge against him, because he marked my final grade a 19.4/20; I'm sure he did it because he didn't want to give me a 20). [1] I can get up before 10h30 fine, and sometimes I get up as early as 6h30 "as needed". But it's definitely not good for me "in the long run" and renders me less productive overall. It is clear my natural rhythm is going to bed at 2h-4h and waking up at 12h-14h. Alas, I go to bed at 2h-4h and wake up 10h-12h. I suppose I'll die younger, but such is life. It's not the amount of sleep, because I've often been able to do great on just 3-5h of sleep consistently. I can sleep 5h, 10h, you name it, and it doesn't matter if I wake up early. Waking up early really ruins me.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I was never a morning person...until I chose to wake up at 5am every day. Now I'm a morning person. I think we are flexible enough to be whatever we want.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  I was never a morning person until I chose to wake up at 6AM. Then I was still not a morning person and hated the first 4 hours of the day even more. Then I went back to past 9 and was happy.
  - jolmg 4y ago
    If you normally wake up at e.g. 10, did you fall sleep 4 hours earlier than normal when trying to wake up at 6?

zahma 4y ago

Not totally a benefit. In the Midwest, if you start class at 9:30, as some middle schools do due to bussing availability, you’d get out at 4:30. In the winter, the sun has set. How horrible that is to feel like the day was spent inside a dingy and neglected building. The advantages of sleep must also be weighed against other psychological benefits.

aynyc 4y ago

This is all good and well. I had a hard time waking up in high school, but all my AP classes are in the morning 8:00-9:30ish. I didn't have a choice.

frogpelt 4y ago

Who's making all these kids stay up late?

83457 4y ago

In my area they swapped high school and middle school times to help HS teens. My 7th grader got up at 5:45am to get ready and catch bus at 6:45am.

fritztastic 4y ago

When I was in high school I went out to catch the bus around 0630, and if I didn't have some caffeine before starting the day being able to focus was nearly impossible. I could function with less sleep then, but even so mornings have always been difficult. I tend to be far more productive at night, and falling asleep is earier during the day. Perhaps someday the routines of society will be able to accomodate starting the day a little later, at least I hope so. Maybe having the first few classes be less mentally intensive. It's difficult to implement changes, though... and there is no universal solution that would work for everyone. Maybe some more flexibility so teens can choose their schedules to suit their individual routines- that would be a good starting point- or something like some light calisthenics or a little stretching before beginning the school day... I feel like it might be helpful to ask teens themselves what they think would make their ability to study more productive and it would be very interesting to know what they have to say.

xxEightyxx 4y ago

This is pretty cool and it's probably healthy. I was homeschooled my whole life with super strict parents - mom was an Olympian, and my father owned a construction company. My brother and I had to be up by 5:30AM for chores and exercising as this was also my moms routine. We were doing school work by 8:00AM with a small break around 10:30AM, then lunch at noon. After lunch, we went out to help my father build houses, then off to sports practices (typically two separate practices for two different sports) and classes at the local college. By the end of the day you're exhausted! A large part of why my parents were so strict is because we were really poor and my parents were determined to not only get out of poverty but also to teach us a good work ethic. So part of me is really biased in thinking "these kids have an easy schedule, why is it so hard for them to get going in the morning?" I wouldn't recommend my upbringing necessarily, but also can't help but wonder if kids had a stricter routine, regularly exercise, good diet, and family support if it wouldn't be slightly easier for them to start the day early. But also on the flip-side I think it's great to let them sleep in because I remember how I felt, and how my friends felt. Lastly, perhaps public education is partially at fault? Sitting in a classroom for hours every day is exhausting, so how about a more hands-on method of learning where kids actually stand at a white board and write out problems and solutions - something that might work in the lecture part of chemistry, physics, math, and perhaps other courses? - We did this in homeschool as well as at the local college I attended and it absolutely helped me wrap my head around things better! I ultimately have no dog in the fight as my family and I do our own thing, this is just my opinion.

bpodgursky 4y ago
> why is it so hard for them to get going in the morning I get that there are a lot of valid cases where the answer is "homework", "circadian rhythms", "evolution", but... 80% of the answer here is electronics, and really just social media + smartphones. It's incredibly easy to stay up too late when you're hyperconnected and chatting with your classmates late into the night. It just wasn't even a possibility 20 years ago.
- jhugo 4y ago
  It's natural to blame this stuff on the latest bogeyman but I doubt it has anything to do with smartphones and social media specifically. I was in school before smartphones and social media, and I just stayed up until the small hours talking on the landline. Kids and teenagers need some time to do their own thing, so given that most of the "waking hours" are filled with school and other things that we effectively force on them, of course they try to steal some hours for themselves where they can.

Bostonian 4y ago

Why shouldn't this be decided at the local level? My high school kids have responded to a later start time by going to sleep later, so I'm not sure there has been much benefit.

clarkmoody 4y ago

Instead of politicians tweaking wake up times, let's give more control to parents and students themselves by moving away from factory-model schooling.

jtdev 4y ago

rkagerer 4y ago

I managed to arrange one semester of university where I didn't have any early morning classes whatsoever. It was bliss.

incanus77 4y ago

Personal anecdote here, and I’m sure things have changed in 30 years, but I feel like it was never a problem for me to attend class starting at 8:15. I had to get up at 6 or 6:30, do outdoor chores like taking care of animals, including in the dead of winter and lots of snow, get a shower, eat a healthy breakfast, catch the bus by about 7:45, and ride in. The secret? I had an early bedtime, typically 9pm, at least to start winding down. It definitely wasn’t cool, I didn’t see the interesting late night TV shows, I didn’t go out much during the week, and I generally wasn’t allowed to do sleepovers on school nights. But I had a rich social life, friends, fun and interesting activities, and did among the best at my school. I know lots of kids who had no bedtimes or who were just in control of getting enough sleep on their own. I don’t think it worked out very well.

iterati 4y ago
There's a study linked in the article about how this isn't statistically how most people work. But you know, it worked for you, so let's just keep doing what we're doing.

hardwaregeek 4y ago

It's weird looking back on high school and realizing how much of it was ridiculously cruel. You'd have teachers and parents all telling you that it's your fault for not having better time management skills or executive functioning skills, all the while you're 15; you're still growing mentally and physically; you're sleep deprived as hell; and the work is just piling on, and on and on. Their advice, I kid you not, was to just squeak in work in every possible situation. On the subway? Read your assigned book. In class? Sneak in some homework. And sure, kids procrastinate. But they procrastinate because they want to have leisure and they feel absolutely no control over their lives. Good luck if you did a sport. I remember hearing some elite fencers talk and all of them said essentially "yeah...I didn't get a lot of sleep in high school". That's not some innocuous hard work ethic mindset. That's messing with a developing brain and depriving it of a necessary resource. It pisses me off that we're just realizing that this culture of torturing teenagers is maybe not the best idea.

baron816 4y ago
Yes, I remember it being framed as a morality issue. If you didn’t wake up early, it’s because you were lazy and irresponsible.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Of all the things wrong with public education, the time I had to get up was the least of my concerns.

dirtyid 4y ago

As a perrenial night owl, I always wish there was parallel social systems from schools to businesses to accomdate people who thrive at night. But enabling 8 hours of sleep after midnight bedtime is a start.

brailsafe 4y ago

With the kind of bullshit I learned in high school, it's almost offensive that I was expected to be there for whatever time it was.

Aurelius3 4y ago
Absolutely, as someone that got 10+ hours of sleep year round for multiple years in high school (early bedtime, early waking), the dread of having to sit in a class and learn horrendous nonsense was more of a motivation to sleep in then actual physical necessity. I suspect it's the case for many adolescents who see little value in secondary courses.

kabes 4y ago

In belgium my school started around 8.30, which meant getting up at 7.30 in my case. I always had a very hard time waking up and was often tired during the day. However in summer, time in Belgium is 2 hours ahead of what's considered 'natural time'. In winter, with DST only 1. Summer or winter, I was always just as tired. Now I need to wake up at around 8.30 for work. I'm still just as tired, since I just go to sleep later. So I'm doubtful this will help much since in my experience the hard part is going to bed early enough.

budoso 4y ago
The issue with kids is theres often a lot of real problems with how they actually get to school. In the US kids will often wait anywhere from 5-20 minutes for the bus, sometimes in 0° F (-17.8° C) weather. Not to mention that waking up before the sunrise has its own issues with decreasing mood.

DocTomoe 4y ago

Hm, story time. I was attending a boarding school in the 1990s as an 'external' student (which means I lived at home and commuted in each day). They started their first period at 7:15 am, because that allowed everyone to go to mess hall at the same time during dinner. Which meant that to catch the bus, I needed to rise at 5am, showered and dressed half-dead, got into the bus at 5:45am, arrived around 6:45am, and stood another half-hour freezing. My brother, who attended another school, started at 8am, which afforded him 80 more minutes of sleep... For normal classes which I had several periods during the week, one being in the early-morning spot did not make much of a difference. Then, one year, I got my favourite subject - physics - scheduled for monday morning, 7:15am, and thursday afternoon at 4:30pm. I failed that class - in a subject in which I used to be a straight A student. The policy had other effects, too. Eventually, I went on autocontrol, getting in on bank holidays (because at 5:00, I would wake automatically, but still was too brain-fogged to realise it was not a working day) on more than one occassion. All that research about teenage circadian cycles came later - and it had absolutely no effect. My nephew is in that very school today (and thanks to my suggestion, because if you take the early rising aspect out, those were the best days of my school life). They still start at 7:15am.

csheehan10 4y ago

I find it very unconvincing that parents needing to get to work on time necessitates starting school so early. In Ireland (a country with very poor public transport) in the 2010s I started secondary school at 8.45am. This usually meant getting up about 7.45am, and being dropped to school by parents about 8.30am, so they'd have plenty of time to make it to work by 9. In what universe is making teenagers arrive in by 7am justified?

rurban 4y ago

I train a teenager who happily starts school at 8:00, but having huge troubles on the weekend to play before 11:30. Not possible even with 2 cups of strong coffee. Probably because his parties usually last until 4am on Friday and Saturday. The challenge will be to play now on the county level, because these games start at Sat 10am not Wed 5pm anymore. Troubled times for teenagers.

rurban 4y ago

The advantage of the decline of public TV is that I can get to sleep now at around 10pm, so I get up at 5:30am every day, to serve my cats. Starting work at 6:30am is a revelation. I get so much more done in the morning, without any interruptions.