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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

#71

Post by ghaff »

wpasc wrote: post #53

I disagree with ideas that school schedules should shift later. I am a night owl myself, but our "natural" sleep cycle certainly more or less falls in line with school times. We have fully disrupted our circadian rhythms with our lifestyles and especially screens/lights at night. Before artificial light, our sleep/wake schedule was set by the sun. I know we live in a different world today, but I feel like shifting ou…

Like many I was certainly a night owl in college. But this idea that it’s impossible for students to change their sleep schedules seems... odd. By that logic no one could ever move across time zones. College students in particular tend to like to stay up late for social and other reasons. But that’s different from being unable to get up earlier. It also isn’t only classes that are early but some athletics as well.

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

#72

Post by watwut »

danharaj wrote: post #55
watwut wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a will, teenagers would be allowed to come sooner or on bike or fully by themselves. If raising children would be really considered important, caregivers needa would not be treated with "shut up and do the things the most complicated way". For that matter, calling school that starts an hour sooner then optimal "calous" is overly hyperbolic, manipulative and dramatic.

> For that matter, calling school that starts an hour sooner then optimal "calous" is overly hyperbolic, manipulative and dramatic. Do you know how miserable it is to be chronically sleep deprived for, like, a decade? Yes, it's callous to make someone suffer like that for the convenience of everyone else.

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.

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

#73

Post by stephen_g »

justherefortart wrote: post #45
anotheryou wrote: post #40

I like how it shows that getting up early ruins the whole day. I have to come an hour early for a meeting every other week and it's always a challenging day... Getting up ~9am is the point at which it doesn't effect my performance anymore (I'd still prefer shifting my sleep phase even further). Sadly this only worked for a job once in my career.

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.

This is exactly the kind of thing people with delayed sleep cycles hear all the time. There is a group of people for which your solution is impossible. Your circadian rhythm is compatible with that kind of schedule, and that's great. Some other people can't do that. I mean, I can wake up early regularly but eventually get into a sort of perpetual feeling just like jet-lag with symptoms of sleep deprivation (even when going to bed earlier and falling asleep early due to exhaustion).

It was actually funny, after one of my recent trips to Europe from Australia, when I came back my (actual) jet lag weirdly landed me in a sort of normal cycle for a week and a bit. It was truely a bizarre experience - I literally cannot remember a time in my life (I'm almost 30) where I could regularly wake up before 9am and being able to go to sleep before 12:30 to 1:30 am and feel normal. But for this little while I was waking up between 7:30-8:30am and going to sleep between 10pm and 11pm. It quickly wore off (discipline doesn't have anything to do with it, you just can't fight your physiology) but it was really interesting and eye-opening experience...

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

#75

Post by ryandrake »

justherefortart wrote: post #45
anotheryou wrote: post #40

I like how it shows that getting up early ruins the whole day. I have to come an hour early for a meeting every other week and it's always a challenging day... Getting up ~9am is the point at which it doesn't effect my performance anymore (I'd still prefer shifting my sleep phase even further). Sadly this only worked for a job once in my career.

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.

I love how I had to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the actual, practical solution. I’ve had to move farther and farther away form work over the years to the point where I need to wake up before 6AM to get to work on time. So I just go to bed earlier. Problem solved. Start going to bed at 8PM. Give it a try for a week and report back whether you have an easier time in the mornings.

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

#76

Post by foepys »

wafflesraccoon wrote: post #50
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.

Source?

German legislation (sadly not directly available in english) [1]

12 months paid leave at 67% of previous income plus 2 months if shared with the other parent.

1: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/beeg/index.html

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

#77

Post by Consultant32452 »

InitialLastName wrote: post #23
endymi0n wrote: post #10

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…

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 that, I think it's clear that there's two curriculums at school: a spoken one and an unspoken one. The spoken curriculum is math, science, reading, etc. The unspoken curriculum is mass social indoctrination around conformity, complacency, and willingness to do boring work with minimal reward for long periods of time. Essentially, to psychologically prepare children for the realities of work life.

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

#78

Post by devy »

endymi0n wrote: post #10

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…

> It starts this early so parents can get their kids to school and start working afterwards, without getting fired.

As a working parent, totally agree. Employers should be more accommodating for working parents just like they do for maternity/paternity programs, but they haven't yet.

Big corporations with HR and dedicated benefit personnels are more tolerable than most startups, unfortunately.

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

#79

Post by scarecrowbob »

taneq wrote: post #29
maxerickson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the horror if we gave other things equal priority with work when we made decisions about how to organize our society. Oh well.

I'd imagine that there were groups of humans who did this, but they got out-competed by humans who gave a higher priority to work.

If you mean "enslaved", maybe.

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

#80

Post by madcaptenor »

brightball wrote: post #39
endymi0n wrote: post #10

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 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?
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