Live data from Hacker News

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

news.berkeley.edu

291–300 of 458 posts

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

#291
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…

It's happening where I live too. It's amazing how quickly the discussion moves past "what's best for students" and into the "it's annoying to me personally" and "when I was a kid, we suffered" conversations.

I feel like you are at least looking in the right direction to possibly realize that the "education" system is not at all primarily about "education", let alone about students. It's foremost a baby sitting service provided for the economy so that professionals and workers can make it to work and provide their labor in a system that was levered into forcing women into the labor force too. Beyond that it's a system to sustain the teachers' union lobby mob and the behemoth of an industry that is a parasite on the "education" system, including facets of the technology sector.

There is a reason that the USA squanders multiples of money that other educational systems around the world spend with horrendous outcomes from it, and it has nothing to do with "education" let alone "think about the children" beyond simply being a tool to manipulate and strong-arm the public through guilt and manipulative lies.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any argument to make about relative quality of life between the US and other countries, because that's largely subjective. That being said, Fennoscandia is an aberration. They are monocultures with virtually no 3rd world immigration. By comparison the US actively seeks immigration from third world countries. There's a lot of political turmoil right there over this issue, immigration policy changes due to…

> That being said, Fennoscandia is an aberration. They are monocultures with virtually no 3rd world immigration. Untrue for Sweden[1] and Norway[2], which have respectively 14.3% and 16.8% of their populations foreign-born. Not all of those foreign-born are from developing nations but developing nations figure heavily in the top-30 list for Sweden. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Demograp... 2.…

Sweden is such a monoculture that when you look at Swedish demographics all Swedes are considered the same and you only count the immigrants as different. The second largest group of immigrants after Syrians is Finns, so a very similar culture. In the US if you look up demographics you barely see the 13% of the population which is foreign born as an *. Instead you get 17% hispanic, 13% black, ~62% white, 5% other. There's no accounting for the difference between a Mexican and a Cuban or a German and an Italian American. If you looked at Swedish demographics the same way it would be more like 95% white, 5% other. The largest single Church in the US is Baptist which accounts for barely 10% of the population. Meanwhile the Swedish National Church accounts for over 60% of the population, the second largest group is "unaffiliated" at 30%.

Norway is not significantly different when looked at in a similar light.

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

#293
For what it's worth my son is at one of the best performing schools in NY State (Top 3%).

They meet at 7.45AM every morning and get most of the learning done while they are the freshest.

I am not convinced this study actually proves that but need to dig deeper in.

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

#294

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."

This brings back memories for me. My friends and I realized even at a young age that we shouldn't have hard classes in the morning, and we almost always chose PE/arts first.

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

#295

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 longitu…

There are tons of lab experiments showing people's ability to learn goes down when they're sleep deprived. Memory consolidation seems to be one of the principle reasons sleep and given all the in-lab double blind studies it would be amazing if people getting less sleep didn't do worse in school. Which isn't to say that this particular paper or article proves that.

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the root of it, they define "core" as Math and English with the goal to centralize those two in the middle of the day as much as possible. Physical Education, Art, Spanish, Music, History, Science, etc are scheduled around those accordingly. The main reasoning is simply that math and English are the two subjects that build upon each other the most from grade level to grade level and because of that, they are consi…

hm, that's very debatable. alot would contend history and science are core but others aren't. I've heard many complain that they never use math in the real world. I think math is core but the problem is its very opinion based. I don't see how other subjects don't build on each other.

Math is like going to the gym but for your brain. I consider it the most expensive sport that you can play. to do math You may never need anything you learn in math but I know it changes my problem solving abilities for the better. The more Math I know the more creative I can be when solving problems.

I agree with you 100% that the average person doesn't need math throughout their lives. We need to stress teaching statistics though in schooling (high school especialy) because that is something that manipulates people constantly .

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to bed earlier. I get up early and have since High School. All I do is make sure I go to bed at a reasonable hour. Going to work, lunch, home early is friggin awesome. Avoiding rush hour, saving me roughly 1 hour a day in traffic, is fantastic. Plus it gives me time to do any personal things in the early afternoon without affecting my work schedule.

Here's what happens (from someone who's been trying this for 12 years, to make the switch): You go to bed early, lay in bed for an hour or so trying to fall asleep. Eventually, frustrated, you get back up again and try to read a book again for a few hours to help you fall asleep. By now it's very late and you wake up tired in the morning. Chronic lack of sleep during the week causes you to catch up on the weekend by…

Exactly, eat less and exercise more!

Discipline is hard, I know.

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

#298

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…

In most of the US, during elementary school, you generally have 1 teacher throughout the day that teaches all subjects, and you only leave to go to PE, art, or music once per day.

Since the whole getting kids to school early so that someone can watch them while the parents work only really only applies to younger students, this isn't a problem.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the root of it, they define "core" as Math and English with the goal to centralize those two in the middle of the day as much as possible. Physical Education, Art, Spanish, Music, History, Science, etc are scheduled around those accordingly. The main reasoning is simply that math and English are the two subjects that build upon each other the most from grade level to grade level and because of that, they are consi…

hm, that's very debatable. alot would contend history and science are core but others aren't. I've heard many complain that they never use math in the real world. I think math is core but the problem is its very opinion based. I don't see how other subjects don't build on each other.

Are the people who never use math high earners? If not, then their complaint actually supports the importance of math.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about those kids who wake up early? I've always been a morning person. Even as a kid I remember waking up with the sun because sleeping always felt like a waste a time with so much fun stuff to do.

I remember staying up as long as I could because there was so much fun to do.

This is probably a generational thing. When I was kid almost all the fun things to do were outside. Surf, ski, swim in the river, fish, sports, etc... all were daytime and outside. We had a NES, and later a SNES but we only used those when it was raining :)
Post reply on HN