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Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

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Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#91

Post by taeric »

wpasc wrote: post #53

I disagree with ideas that school schedules should shift later. I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times. We have fully disrupted our circadian rhythms with our lifestyles and especially screens/lights at night. Before artificial light, our sleep/wake schedule was set by the sun. I know we live in a different world today, but I feel like shifting ou…

We used to shift our schedule pretty much daily. Outside of the equator, the night shifts pretty majorly throughout the year. And at the equator, the sun is deadly during the day. Such that our ancestors probably slept as often during the day as the did some nights.

Not to say we shouldn't work on sleep hygiene, but the myth that it is a modern crisis is misguided. Used to, people blamed caffeine. Just look for numbers to see how much more coffee used to be consumed.

All of that said, much of the difficulties in education for kids are also explainable by our bar just being higher. Much higher. But, I'd rather our methods improve. Not lowering our expectations.

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#92

Post by cmpb »

madcaptenor wrote: post #80
brightball wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools can still help with this by trying to schedule the core academic stuff later in the the day and the less mentally intense stuff like PE earlier in the morning. My kids' elementary school actually does this. They tell parents "if your child has a doctor's appointment or needs to be out for a portion of the day, schedule it at the beginning or end of the day to make sure they don't miss anything important."

I wonder how they schedule that. Does that mean that all PE classes (assuming PE is part of the "unimportant" category) are either at the beginning or the end of the day? What does the PE teacher do in the middle of the day, then?

Often PE teachers (and coaches) are also teachers. My civics, geography and geometry teachers were all football coaches. Incidentally, they were also not very learned in their respective courses.

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#93

Post by projektir »

watwut wrote: post #72
danharaj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For that matter, calling school that starts an hour sooner then optimal "calous" is overly hyperbolic, manipulative and dramatic. Do you know how miserable it is to be chronically sleep deprived for, like, a decade? Yes, it's callous to make someone suffer like that for the convenience of everyone else.

You can and should go to bed earlier. Learning to go to sleep is important part of adulthood. The debate about whethe start an hour later or sooner due to natural rhythms is completely pointless for students that don't sleep even minimal needed amount of hours. Those need to fix "hours slept" metric first.

Yeah let's ignore the research that shows teenagers literally have a shifted sleep schedule and can't actually go to sleep early in a reliable manner.

What's going on here is that we don't give a shit about people, and we like pretending that the world is fair, so whenever we're committing an atrocity (yes, this is an atrocity, sleep deprivation is a form of torture), we try to blame it on the victim. Because "we have generated an atrocity, built our society around it, and are now trying to not come to terms with that" is a tougher pill to swallow than "teenagers just all, universally, suck".

This is garbage and I really wish parents would start seeing this as a big issue, big enough to raise hell not just with their school, but with their job and with society at large. Parents sure seem to have enough energy to cause teachers problems...

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#94

Post by hysan »

madcaptenor wrote: post #80
brightball wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools can still help with this by trying to schedule the core academic stuff later in the the day and the less mentally intense stuff like PE earlier in the morning. My kids' elementary school actually does this. They tell parents "if your child has a doctor's appointment or needs to be out for a portion of the day, schedule it at the beginning or end of the day to make sure they don't miss anything important."

I wonder how they schedule that. Does that mean that all PE classes (assuming PE is part of the "unimportant" category) are either at the beginning or the end of the day? What does the PE teacher do in the middle of the day, then?

Teach health? Sex Ed? Preparation and setup? My PE teachers in JHS and HS were more than just PE teachers. Was my school just an outlier?

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#95

Post by erikpukinskis »

gliboc wrote: post #57
vanderZwan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think every form of natural selection is automatically proof that whatever came out is the best option, then you do not understand evolution at all.

He didn't say that at all. The only fact you can derive from evolution is that some things existed, and now they either do or don't exist. That's exactly what he is saying. You could argue that maybe some solutions were not even tried before, or that they were tried and abandonned for random reasons. But actually, since the evolution process took a long time, we can reasonably say that we are witnessing the mean outc…

You are assuming the fitness landscape never changes, which is not a good assumption.

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#96

Post by briandear »

tehwalrus wrote: post #60
wafflesraccoon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

The UK. https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights (I was actually shocked that Americans don't always get paid holiday.) Note that we also have 6 months paid maternity leave, and 1 weeks paid paternity leave, with both of those extendable on a lower pay rate. New legislation from the 2010-2015 government allows parents to share this leave, even if they work at different companies, and start/stop it during the tim…

And, by the way, Netflix gives an entire paid YEAR off for maternity.

I wonder why? Could it be that competition has inspired them to compete? My point: free markets are a powerful thing. When there is no differentiation and everyone is “the same,” then it stifles innovation. Working at Peugeot is no more interesting than working for Renault. Which means their cars are going to be average. But if Peugeot were offering some great benefit, the best engineers would flock to Peugeot and that would result in better Peugeot cars. Renault, in order to compete would have to try and top Peugeot, which then leads to great engineers going there.. and so on until competition pressures ultimately drive companies to higher and higher levels of success and innovation. Just like what happens in Silicon Valley. Instead, in Europe, you have this malaise, this equalitarianism that inspires nobody. There is a lack of ambition.

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#98

Post by Balgair »

This study was done on college students, not elementary and HS students, college students at Cal. There are a lot of caveats here and trying to apply them to elementary education is good, but outside the scope.

Aside: If you really want test scores to improve, give the kids food. My SO is an educator and she's had kids come in that only get food at school. All weekend they may only eat a bag of Cheetos, sometimes up to 2/3 kids on Monday mronings. School breakfast and lunch are sometime the only food they get.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#99

Post by projektir »

briandear wrote: post #82
jaltekruse wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several countries in Europe that give maternity/paternity leave and vacation time to all full time employees by law. The result is not a massive drop in productivity, on the contrary studies have indicated higher overall productivity in many cases. There are things besides short term business gain that societies can invest in that can end up with everyone better off in the long run, even economically.

What does that have to do with school start times? Do parents take “parental leave” every morning to take their kids to school later? Of course not. And maternity/paternity leave has little to do with school age kids. France has the “genius” idea to have school only 4 days per week in most places. So Wednesdays off. Parents have to figure out what to do with their kids — they can’t exactly take off every Wednesday. A…

> Salaries are dramatically lower in Europe and taxes higher — so even when all of these benefits are tallied, Americans still have more disposable income along with lower unemployment and a far more robust economy.

I wonder what you mean by "Americans", I really don't see how a minimum wage American part time worker has "more disposable income" than someone in Europe with any measure of health insurance?

Minimizing America may be fashionable, but the awful situation of a lot of working people in America is not at all made up, and, no, the money doesn't compensate it. It just compensates it (maybe) for software engineers.

Re: Poor Grades Tied to Class Times That Don’t Match Our Biological Clocks

#100

Post by aeriklawson »

endymi0n wrote: post #10

I used to have lots of problems getting up early and always championed later times. Growing up through my twenties, it was great seeing finally seeing more and more evidence for a later school start and I was hopeful for future teens. But it wasn't until my first kid that I finally understood that school doesn't start this early because it's good for the learning experience. It starts this early so parents can get th…

A lot of it is due to athletics - my school had to end practices before certain times and could not offset the school day without blowing away athletic programs.
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