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

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101–110 of 458 posts

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

#101
post #7

Our school district just spent the last year trying to convince parents we should shuffle around start times to make high school later and elementary school earlier. It was a complete clusterfuck. Both teacher and parents alike at both the elementary and the high schools all had a million reasons why it couldn’t possibly work. Since there are a limited number of buses which are shared, you can’t move one start time w…

My campus had a rolling start of day, depending on the university that's attended. I don't know when it was enacted but it certainly helped with congestion in the transports in the morning and in the cafeteria for lunch. Students are autonomous though. I can imagine that school pupils are not and they cause troubles for parents.

> Students are autonomous though. I can imagine that school pupils are not and they cause troubles for parents.

We could have made school children autonomous far sooner if we wanted to.

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

#102

It's frustrating that we let antiquated systems remain in the face of new data indicating that the system could be improved. I don't think it's ANYONE's goal to let some people get worse grades just because. Generally, the goal of schooling is to get everyone to a better, more knowledgeable version of themselves in preparation for the world.

> Generally, the goal of schooling is to get everyone to a better, more knowledgeable version of themselves in preparation for the world.

Call me cynical, but I seriously doubt that this is the actual goal of schooling for pretty much anyone. The real purpose of school seems to be a) to get rid of kids so they're not muddling about in early hours; b) to generate a hierarchy of kids so we can figure out who to put in the lower castes.

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

#103
post #33

I dropped out of high school partly because waking up was such a painful experience for me. Of course as an adult I wake up at 5:45-6AM.

Waking up as an adult is so much easier.

I recall my high school days were absolutely awful, I could never wake up properly in the morning and I zombie-made coffee and then zombie-walked to school.

Right now, if I need to wake up at 6 AM, for one, it's much easier to just shift my schedule, and for another, even if I don't get as many hours of sleep it just doesn't hit me all that hard.

And I think people judge teenagers off of the adult scale, which is completely off...

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

#104

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.

Mine was the same way, but athletics should really be in the morning.

My cross country team had no problem getting up at 7 in the morning for weekend and summer practice.

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

#105

At the same time, the point of college for most kids is to prepare them for a white collar job. If there's a huge client meeting at 10am and there's still 3 hours of preparation to do before they arrive, no one's going to be very sympathetic to the excuse that you have "social jet lag." Expecting college adults to get out of bed before 10 is hardly a substantial burden.

Except there's no reason to prepare anything here because the problem is biological. It's simply easier to wake up early as an adult. Just like many others things are easier for physical reasons that society keeps trying to "teach".

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 offerin…

So 5000 Netflixers having pretty fantastic maternity leave is your answer for tens of millions of Europeans having pretty fantastic maternity leave?

Arithmetic is actually pretty useful for thinking about what more labor friendly laws might do in the US. Say you decide that every employee should get a paid day off if they work for 240 hours (this is 6 weeks full time, so someone averaging 30 hours a week would receive 6.5 paid days off each year). How much would that cost? It would cost right around 3% of what they are already being paid. And since we know people with no paid time off are working low leverage jobs, we can probably infer that it would come right out of the consumer surplus that their employee provides to customers.

But sure, let's pretend that some small baseline of non-hell would erode ambition in people competing for jobs at Netflix.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 offerin…

Unfortunately for your argument, companies in the UK also compete by offering paid maternity leave longer than the legal minimum - like PWC which offers an entire paid YEAR.

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

#108

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…

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 remember nothing worse in High School than waking up showering and getting dressed for school, only to have PE class first period.

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

#109
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

This was the same for us. The exception was the teacher that made me fall in love with history as a subject. He was also an assistant basketball coach, but he was passionate about history.

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

#110
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Sleep deprived person is able to sleep in the dark. Try again. And no, even if suboptimal, middle class teenagers don't go through atrocity nor torture.

If you actually went to bed and stayed there and could not sleep anyway despite being horribly sleep deprived, then you really should visit some sleep center to help you. It is not nearly the same as mild performance drop due to having suboptimal sleep time.

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