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Let Teenagers Sleep

scientificamerican.com

201–210 of 497 posts

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#201
post #117

What time does school start in the USA? I assumed it would be the same as here but apparently not, never heard of a school formal lesson starting before 8:30 here and 9am start is the norm for all school and always(?) has been. Separate to that how cynical should we be about these psychology studies? As a science it seems hell bent on demonstrating that it is closer to poetry or religion which means we should start w…

My school bus arrived at the school at 7:05 every morning. We were allowed in the building at 7:15. At 7:28 we were allowed to go to our lockers. Classes began at 7:30. My bus time varied by year, but the earliest pickup time I had was 6:20.

Ok. Deeply surprised by that info. I basically never woke before 7am (and that was too early!)

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#202
post #179

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

There should be two categorizations for students: highly creative students should be placed on a different path to adulthood, everybody else could use the current system. Highly creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts. To force highly creative people into this routine, is dictatorship of the mind. That's how it was for me. Edit: I upset the academics :)

How would you identify highly creative people? Genuinely asking. If you advantage them, parents will do everything they can to make their kid look like one even if they aren’t one. And some kids will not look like one due to a bad home life or food insecurity or untreated developmental disorder.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#203
A teenager myself, I agree schools should start later. To my surprise, the gym teacher is allowed to make some students wake up at 5 A.M. to run laps. There's also no reason why classes starts so early at my specific school, as sport teams and extracurriculars are basically inexistant. The bureaucracy behind all of this must be such a nightmare in Canada too...

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we have school busses. Why are children being tasked with transporting other children to school?

School busses are shared across age ranges. So teenagers get the first bus, then middle schoolers get one an hour later, then grade schoolers. So if you punt the highschool bus to later, you are either making for a very late school day, or making younger kids wake up earlier. Or the solution could be to triple the cost of school transportation.

Or locate schools closer to where people live. It seems like it ought to be possible to locate at least elementary schools within walking distance of the kids homes.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#205
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No such thing as too early. Our public HS swim team used to do the water part at 6am then cross training (running or weight room) after school. Probably because of pool availability

Swimming seems to have a tradition of pre-dawn practice times. I never understood that. Nobody uses the high school pool after school (unless there's a meet).

No schools around here have pools, have to share the YMCA pools with other groups

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#206

The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. For those sports to thrive, teams need to practice, in order for practice to be efficient, it needs to be at least an hour. So 2 hours are allocated (suit up, practice, suit down). In order for children to be able to commit to 2 hours extra of their time BEFORE their parents get home (5pm), class would have to end by 3pm. Now,…

6:15? Holy crap. High school here (Australia) starts at 8:50. And even then I think that's too early for natural teenage sleep patterns.

My kids are lucky in that we're close enough to school that they can leave at around 8:15. When I was in high school I had to get the bus at 7:30, which was a real struggle. The idea of starting school at 6:15 is just pure insanity.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is heavily resisted by sports parents, especially. They like the extra afternoon time after school that an early start provides. It's one of the main reasons I've seen these kinds of proposals shot down before it could really get going, locally. > everyone leaves for school at the same time, so if you move grade 9 forward an hour, you have to do the same with grade 4 to get any benefit; the 9th grader is taking th…

Sports have become way too important in high school. In addition to bad ideas about start times, site selection for schools based on having huge amounts of land for sports fields means far away schools instead of being centrally located near a lot of people so students can walk to school easily.

We have one local district with a weirdly-far-removed area with a couple local schools but who have to travel really far to get to the high school, which is farther out of the city in an exurb town. That's (the town) also where all the sports facilities are.

Everyone concerned would clearly be better off if this little area could be absorbed by another district (it has two better-fit candidates bordering it! Of the three plausible options, it's connected to the silliest one! And, hell, those two are both better ranked, academically than the one it's attached to, by a long shot!) or become its own mini-district—the ones up in the town hate the ones from "down South" (and, yes, there's very explicitly a racist element to this for some of them—which is fucking absurd anyway, the area's majority white and includes some neighborhoods far richer than the average of the town, but having lived in a different but similarly-situated far-removed exurb growing up, I know exactly the kind of messed-up ideas they get about "the city") and resent sending any district money that way, while having to go way North for high school sucks for the ones down South, both due to the sheer distance and because of the, ahem, cultural differences.

Why will they never separate? Losing those kids would drop the district into a less-prestigious sports conference, since they'd be smaller. No way they wouldn't fight any change, tooth and nail, despite plainly thinking the kids from farther south are shit. Plus they, ah, rely on that geographically-nonsensical southern annex for player recruitment. Yes, the whole thing's just as gross, in fact, as that reads. All because of fucking school sports.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#208
post #137
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if the family includes one of each (elementary, middle and high school kids) you still have to make breakfast for them, get everyone ready and head out. Surely high school aged kids can make their own breakfast.

Surely the high school aged kids can make sure to not oversleep and be responsible enough to ensure that their parents won't get a call at 9:15 when they've failed to show up on time.

The vast majority of them are... to the detriment of their health and learning. Did you read the article?

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#209

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

This is a deeply cynical view and mistakes what makes educating children challenging for the goals of education. Some educators suck. Some educational systems suck. Some engineers suck. Some tech companies suck. But to paint the entire educational system with the same shitty brush is absurd. I know many teachers and many people who work in education who go above and beyond to try to give kids the best experience possible. And despite what the tech universe seems to think, educational approaches change and improve and new ideas come into the mix, sometimes fairly rapidly. If anything, it's the fact that educational systems seem to be habitually underfunded that hinders them more than anything.

Fund free public education. It pays back huge dividends.

And treat teachers with respect.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#210
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sports can practice before school Hilarious, given the original thread. School already starts far too early.

No such thing as too early. Our public HS swim team used to do the water part at 6am then cross training (running or weight room) after school. Probably because of pool availability

You’re kidding right? To me, requiring students to wake up before 7 AM should be considered hazing.
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