Live data from Hacker News

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

news.berkeley.edu

121–130 of 458 posts

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

#121
post #5

Do we like to tell ourselves the purpose of school is academics or athletics? If athletics, school must start as early as possible, so "away" outdoor games can be held outside in sunlight and "away" teams can get home at a reasonable hour. If academics, school should start as late as possible, so students (and instructors!) can do class prep immediately before class and/or sleep in. Its interesting that the only acce…

How could athletics be the purpose of school?

Social context? During a war, there might be more focus on producing fit troops. Or a even a primary focus on providing resources to the military.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That emphasizes that the purpose of school isn't as much to educate children as it is to provide an economy of scale for babysitting so that more adults can participate in the workforce. I wonder how that dynamic will interact with the decreasing need for adults in the workforce.

It's not just economy of scale for babysitting, though that is a big component. In fact, the timing of compulsory education being enacted into law coincides with men coming back from the world wars and the creation of child labor laws, denying children the right to work so their parents could have better jobs. I'm not here advocating putting kids back in the factories, just pointing out the history. In addition to th…

> denying children the right to work so their parents could have better jobs.

This is basically what I'm saying; educational requirements are an easy way to track the workforce. At the end of the wars, the labor market contracted hugely (as those soldiering jobs went away), so our society cut the least valuable workers out of the workforce. That it had humanitarian justifications, in that those workers also had the least personal agency and influence over their working conditions, is almost coincidental.

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

#123
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> sleep in the dark

I'm not sure what you're even trying to say. This is about chronotypes and a teenager-specific sleeping pattern that has been identified and studied.

Sleep deprivation is torture, this is not my definition. Sorry, we, as a society, decided that not letting people sleep properly is really fucking crappy. If you want to disagree with that, take that up with the party that came up with the terms. Messing with someone's sleep is a major offense, and there are various ways in which it can happen, and psychology recognizes them, even if you don't.

Yes, I'm sure most teenagers have means to go to a sleep center, with their full human rights and disposable income. And when pretty much every teenager has this problem I'm sure that's a good use of resources.

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

#124
post #118

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."

Sorry, not from the US. What does PE mean?

Physical education. In India, in our schools it mostly meant playing Soccer.

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

#125

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."

The problem with that is rotating schedules is more economically efficient than loading all the class-types onto one time of the day. This would mean you need more PE teachers in the morning, more math teachers in the mid-day. There's a reason schools have multiple periods of each course, and that those periods rotate day-to-day. One interesting follow-up study could be to compare night-owls/morning-larks in rotating…

> There's a reason schools have multiple periods of each course, and that those periods rotate day-to-day

Could you elaborate on this? What is the reason? Saying it's "more economically efficient" than grouping class types is something many of my teachers would disagree with, as they have lives they would love to get to outside of school (e.g. if a PE teacher gets out early in the morning, they can go to their second job or see their own kids) and complain about having to stay at school because there isn't enough time between similar classes that are spread across different times of day.

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

#126
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And where is the European Apple? European Google? European Facebook? Even the European Intel, ARM, now belongs to Japan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no... The USA is below both Norway and Ireland in the rankings table of GDP per capita, pretty consistently over the different measurements.

>> GDP per capita

Are we going to ignore the effects of immigration and the comparative policies of both nations here, or just pretend that a mostly-homogenous nation like Norway (or other Scandi countries) should be equally compared to the United States?

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

#127

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…

Let me guess, you believe governments should be run like companies, right?

Perhaps, ask yourself why you come down on the side of moneyed interests in every point you make.

When I see this kind of dogmatic badgering, Its almost like my brain is superimposing a Fast Fourier Transform frequency plot on that person, and all of the energy is found to be in a single bin.

Your single bin is money. As this pure tone, it is literally your equation.

I don't have to tell you that this makes you give whores a bad name.

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

#128
I am more than half way through the book "Why we sleep?" by Matthew Walker and it is not a surprise to me that misalignment of circadian rhythm with class schedules results in poor grades. The book goes into great detail on the importance of getting eight hours of sleep on a regular schedule. Getting less than eight hours of sleep is tied to every imaginable disease and poor memory. I highly recommend reading the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could athletics be the purpose of school?

Social context? During a war, there might be more focus on producing fit troops. Or a even a primary focus on providing resources to the military.

I really dont want to be a fodder for the military? Would it not make more sense to concentrate on problems that are now as opposed to possibles? The current place of athletics in the school system really fucks things up.

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

#130

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…

The U.K. gets a “paid” holiday? So why are salaries in the U.K. so much lower than the US? Seems like the only one paying for holidays is the worker.

According to Gallup in 2013 the median incomes in the US and UK were $15,500 and $12,400 adjusted. Considering that US citizens pay on average 10% of earnings on healthcare where the UK doesn't that makes it more akin to $14,000 vs $12,400.

Except here is something you didn't know - that British citizen isn't paying income tax at all. Their 0% bracket goes all the way to about $16,000 USD Today. That US citizen is paying about $1650 in income tax because there is no 0% bracket in the US. So in actual take home income they are almost exactly the same. The mess of tax code in both countries makes the calculations more complicated, plus other taxes, etc - but the point is that no, U.K. citizens are not being paid "so much lower" than the US on average, but they do get the benefit of never dying of preventable illness because they can't afford to see a doctor while having all that extra aforementioned paid time off and holiday benefits that US workers don't have.

Additionally, the US isn't even at the top of median individual income. Fennoscandia collectively has the US beat, by on average about 20%. Which is going to be offset by their average ~25%ish income tax, but still its comparable returns.

It turns out that if your economy is abusing you to get more productivity out of you that you don't get a better living out of it.

Post reply on HN