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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

#281

Post by lutorm »

bryondowd wrote: post #165
tmuir wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was so traumatizing about the showers available to you in high school? Because I certainly remember first period gym, and I just took a shower afterwards. Then I was right as rain.

My school didn't allow us to use the showers after PE. First period PE meant you could either minimize your participation or be sweaty all day. The showers were only available for the sports teams after school. Don't know how common that is.

We all showered, and there was plenty of time allocated. This was in Sweden, though. Yet another weirdness about American schools...

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

#282

Post by Jemmeh »

jamescostian wrote: post #125
WhompingWindows wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everyone keeps saying PE but imagine 1 math teacher trying to teach 150 kids at once. Not effective with traditional teaching. We already struggle with overly large class sizes making it harder to teach.

I got to go to a fancy school where there were like 12 kids in the class. It was amazing, I learned so much during my time there. Conversely, I went to some pretty shoddy city schools as well and the teacher could barely get the students to just be quiet.

I will say in yet another school (I moved A LOT) for my final semester of high school I went to an alternative school where you did all your coursework on the computers. You could work as fast or as slow as you wanted. It didn't take very many teachers to run that at all. The computer took care of most of it, including hints and letting you rewatch how to solve the problem. I loved this-- school was always kind of boring and I was always one of the first to finish and just end up reading a book...but I was able to finish up my whole class extremely quickly (I think a month or so, it's been a few years).

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

#284

Post by cgriswald »

dcosson wrote: post #226
cgriswald wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a mischaracterization to say this is all the result of bad habits. Asking teens and young adults to perform between 6 and 9 is like asking a fully mature adult to perform between 3 and 6. > I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times. This is absolutely not true for adolescents continuing through young adulthood. Adolescents naturally have a dela…

> It is not (necessarily) poor sleep hygiene which causes teens to stay up later, but their own biological processes. I'm genuinely curious about this, do you have links to evidence of this? You're asserting a certain causal order, but everything I've seen such as the article this thread is purely observational so doesn't say anything about the causality of it.

Sure, read this review: https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/216538

Abstract: Sleep deprivation among adolescents is epidemic. We argue that this sleep deprivation is due in part to pubertal changes in the homeostatic and circadian regulation of sleep. These changes promote a delayed sleep phase that is exacerbated by evening light exposure and incompatible with aspects of modern society, notably early school start times. In this review of human and animal literature, we demonstrate that delayed sleep phase during puberty is likely a common phenomenon in mammals, not specific to human adolescents, and we provide insight into the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.

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

#286

Post by Eric_WVGG »

enknamel wrote: post #243

Can't biological clocks change? Or are there really populations of people who have a truly different clock? Or is it a result of their environment? Personally I've been a night owl and a morning person alternating between the two throughout my life by choice.

Sure. Mine, and I think many others, changed precisely when I went through puberty. Early riser before, late riser after and ever since.

My grades (predictably) crashed early in high school, didn't start to recover until I discovered coffee. But that couldn't be found in my Utah high school, of course, so I either had to sneak a cup in or find someplace to "joe up" during lunch.

Additionally, six years ago I moved into an apartment with a huge east-facing window. Now I'm a natural morning person again — during the summer months.

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

#288

Post by tmuir »

InitialLastName wrote: post #244
tmuir wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make your nebulous conspiracy theory more believable or less believable when you consider that the age of 18 is generally when people's bodies have reached full maturity? Personally, if my 22 year old self travelled in time three years backwards to meet 17 year old me, and then travelled 20 years forward to present day to me current me, I have no doubt 18 year old me would the odd man out in this triplet.

I don't think it's particularly a "conspiracy theory", in that there's no cabal of people trying to cover this up. It's more an optimization function; we have N productivity units, and M humans (where M > N), so we hire from the most productive subsets of M. For the less productive subsets (largely youths, criminals, geriatrics), we encourage institutionalization to minimize the portion of M-productive required to ma…

So your saying, like all science that arrives at an answer that controls for time, fourier analysis is our best heuristic.

Much of your verbage describes the general concepts at play which tease out the frequency components in fourier transforms.

So knowing what you know about 8 year olds working in coal mines, and contrasting that with the general working conditions of a 22 year old knowledge worker, what cohesion can you deduce by controlling for time?

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

#289

Post by gpmcadam »

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…

As another commenter suggests, this isn't the same as flexible working hours.

And also, it doesn't fairly compare because this is legally forced, instead of letting the market determine such needs. The comment you're replying to is suggesting that naturally, companies which start earlier and aren't as accompanying of flexible working for parents, will do better in the market. Your comment doesn't debunk this theory.

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

#290

Post by AStellersSeaCow »

I don't doubt that the findings are the case, I've experienced it myself and seen it in plenty others. What I would've liked to see in the paper, though, is more proof of the cause-and-effect relationship's weight here: do people who naturally stay up late get worse grades, or do people who get worse grades end up with worse sleep habits?

I'd guess there's some degree of both, but without the study being more longitudinal (eg, tracking the same population across their entire time in college to see how their grades and sleep habits relate) it's hard to say. Purely anecdotally, I've seen people who start struggling (for reasons that have nothing to do with sleep) drift into a depressive/withdrawn existence that includes insomnia and sleeping late.

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