How bizarre to read that an entire culture apparently has promoted extraordinary lazy kids for 5 or so decades, because their standard school starting time differs from the US one.
I don't know if it's envy, if they oldies are uncomfortable with change, or they just feel incomplete if there isn't someone lower down on the foodchain.
Arguing with them is of little use, they already decided their position, and what they are giving you are their justifications and confabulations for why it's okay to do so.
That's why there are articles about how Millenials have destroyed the economy and the housing market because they eat too many avocados and are all turning gay and genderfluid. Millenials even broke politics, but all the politicans are like 80
It's okay for a senile 90 year old to vote even if he never finished school and voted for the same party his entire life, but a 17 year old just isn't mature enough. However it's okay to draft them into the army just 1 year later and send them off to die in a foreign land, without them ever having had a chance to vote on the issue. It's also okay to send them to prison.
1 - Adults that get some kind of power trip out of tyrany and justify it by 'toughening them up'. They demand respect and dicipline they never had themselves. They will have endless stories about how their childhood was tough, and they had to talk to school and home 10 miles, alone, thorugh the snow, and it was uphill both ways
2 - Adults that 'care', by helicoptering over kids and try to shape them into a career they wish they pursued themselves. In practice they rob kids of all agency and don;t let them gow. These guys are like a 'left-wing' version of the above, for lack fo a better metaphor.
3 - Adults that actually respect children as people with independant thoughts and emotional needs - seem to be a minority.
Because everything gets easier with experience. I think everyone has thought at some time what they would do differently if they were kids again or back to school again. Some things we'd do better and have a handle on because as an adult you have some school and life experience.
If they then without empathy look at schoolkids they don't understand how they think and what they struggle with.
What's worse is the end of day. My kid is younger and I need to be at the bus stop at 3:50 PM every day to meet her.
Schools shouldn't be forcing developing humans into a schedule that impairs their ability to learn and function, no matter what they want to decide
It's to late to help us.. my youngest just turned 16 and will be able to drive themself to school next year and we'll finally get decent sleep during the school year. But this would be a big boon to lots of people.
1) The flipside to starting much later is that kids will be exiting schools later. Want to participate in some after school activities or clubs that aren't physically in school? A HS kid wants to hold down a little part time job so she can save to buy that first car or afford that summer trip she wants? Any activities out of school become much more difficult to manage if the exiting time moves any later. And these extracurriculars are also a big part of many peoples' lives.
2) I think it's naive to think that kids will get much extra sleep regardless of the school starting time. Their need for socialization and leisure activities out of school doesn't suddenly vanish if school starts later: they just get shifted. If you tell kids that they can manage to wake up at 9 instead of 7 and still make it to school on time, they'll just tend to stay up about 2 hours later playing games, watching movies, or chatting with friends. The end result might be about the same amount of sleep.
3) Logistically, it's hard enough for most parents to see their kids for a few minutes and deal with getting their kids out of the door in the morning (or driving them to school) when their wakeup times roughly coincide and they can get a little breakfast together or have a few minutes to chat. Trying to arrange a much different school schedule for kids is going to present a lot more difficulties to working parents, particularly if the kid has some special needs, is a tad rebellious about going to school, or you have to drive them for some other reason.
Just thinking out loud here, but I'd say that getting rid of the nightly busy work (homework) is a better way to fix teens schedules. They already spend enough time at school learning. Stop forcing them to waste an hour or two every night regurgitating mostly busy work and then feeling like crap and needing to stay up another few hours decompressing. Let them get their fill of fun and socialization after a long day. Without the burden of homework, most teens have enough extra time in the day to get a little extra rest and still have enough to unwind and feel like a human.
2) There have been bunches of studies that show teenagers don't get proper sleep specifically when they get up early. There is something about that age that requires sleeping later to get good rest. No matter when they go to bed.
3) Who says their waking coincides with the current times? Doesn't for us. Something like 9:30 or 10:00 would.
Or they could just give that time back. Maybe things have changed, but back when I was in school, almost every class was a waste of time.
Teens who go to bed at a reasonable hour are getting enough sleep and performing well.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-03/californ...
If I were back in high school, all this would have told me is that I'm staying up until at least midnight, if not later. I was usually good about sleeping around 9:30pm which gave me roughly 9 hours sleep.
Since I assume this means school will end later in the day, this just means homework gets pushed much later too. My parents were very strict about homework being done the same day, so there's no chance I would have been able to keep my old schedule and do homework in the mornings.
I'm curious what the effect is on the average and median kids. This would have been incredibly annoying for me.
Your school admins were assholes. What unholy sadists would start school that early??
What country was this?
I'm happy my school admins made this available to us. I don't understand your rage.
I'm in Southern California now. My kids middle school starts at 9... I'm glad High School will now be similar.
I would always pretty much get as little sleep as I could function with because at that age, video games were more important, lol. But I don't want to extrapolate my experience, I'm sure most kids will adjust... but I can see a fair amount having even worse sleeping schedules.
All that to say, glad to know that future generations of high schools will be getting more rest.
1. elementary school starts at 7:30AM, middle school at 8:20, high school at 9:10 here. So, the youngest kid gets up at 6:50AM, older ones at 7:50AM, oldest at 8:40(assuming you're not too far from school that is). why the youngest ended up getting up the earliest puzzles me.
2. School is off in hot summer and cold winter, I would prefer they study on campus then, so they can enjoy longer break in spring and fall, where outdoor weather is much better to get around.
>Since the 1950s Americans have been moving away from cities to sprawling suburbs with limited public transport. Families became car-dependent and buses were used to get pupils to school. But to save money schools often have to share bus fleets. High-schoolers are usually picked up first, then middle school, to prevent elementary pupils from waiting in the morning darkness.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/06/23/californi...
> the youngest kid gets up at 6:50AM, older ones at 7:50AM, oldest at 8:40
The comment you posted said
> High-schoolers are usually picked up first, then middle school, to prevent elementary pupils from waiting in the morning darkness.
They seem opposite, no?
I think there's been quite a few studies indicating that teenagers benefit the most from later start times due to the shift in their internal clock. Little kids can deal with earlier start times.
Staggered start is frequently due to logistics; they don't want to pay for a larger fleet of school buses and drivers to facilitate the schools starting at the same time.
Supposedly Summer break is so that kids can help with harvests on family farms.
With the pandemic and WFH I shifted much closer to my natural schedule.
We're officially back in the office now, but nobody is really taking attendance so I get up at around 11, do some email while I eat breakfast, then head in to the office until about 6pm. I'm still getting as much or more done as I ever did, because I was too tired to be effective when I was coming in at 8:00 and basically just stared at the screen for two or three hours until I really woke up.
It's so parents who have to go to work, can drop their kids off. The youngest are the ones who shouldn't (in most cities unfortunately) be going by public transports by themselves. While teens can just take the bus or subway.
If the school system would team up with public transit, they are already a quarter of the say to all day bus service for everyone.
I've always heard teenagers need more sleep than younger kids. I've never actually verified this claim.
In my area it's the opposite, and the reason is simple: high schoolers don't need childcare.
> School is off in hot summer and cold winter, I would prefer they study on campus then, so they can enjoy longer break in spring and fall, where outdoor weather is much better to get around.
That's a pure anachronism, but switching costs are genuinely high so not totally irrational.
2. Highly regionally variable (California summer is the best season by far, east coast summer is much worse than fall) - summer also has the longest daytime light which is nice.
While letting yawning teenagers get more sleep seems obvious, the lesser evil is having them get up while it's dark out instead of making 10 year olds walk to the bus stop in darkness, or walk home in twilight. Folks would drive their kids to school if they could, my dad did for me and my little brother as much as possible, but in a household where both parents have jobs, it's not a realistic solution, and that was the reality for most people in the district I lived in.
School curricula have changed significantly the last couple of decades, esp. in california.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711020
Based on an Atlantic piece:
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/06/american-...
Another quicker read is here: Chronotype and Adolescence: Why being an "evening person" as a teenager is disadvantageous [https://www.psychologyinaction.org/psychology-in-action-1/20...]
Basically, even for those who don’t have a night owl chronotype, our sleep shifts back during adolescence. We now know how important sleep is for learning and memory consolidation.
Having schools stagger start time for different cohorts based on preference sounds like the most obvious answer to me to alleviate the problems caused by imposing early start times on all students. One size fits all is hardly ever the best solution.
So getting up at 7 to make an 8:30 start wasn't so bad. My high school was a fifteen minute walk, or a similar bus ride in the winter. So it wasn't so bad.
My high school started at 8:20 but we had a 0-period option at 7:15 which is when we were able to take other arts classes like concert band.
I ultimately was in 3 music related classes in high school: concert band at 0-period, jazz band at 4th period, and a small combo band after school 3-days per week.
I loved having a longer day when it meant I could do more of what I wanted to do and also get some flexibility around the school's otherwise rigid schedule but looking back I really appreciate that the longer day was at least partially from starting earlier.
Starting these longer days early meant I still had a lot of free time after school as well to spend with friends even if they were involved in the "standard" day and gave me unstructured free time before my parents came home and before I had to worry about doing things like homework.
So I guess the time that kids spend in public schools can be cut tremendously, instead of its start being shifted from early morning to a bit later morning. But I doubt that useless time elimination can be achieved via legislation.
So while this will obviously have a positive effect on 'night owls', may it have a negative effect on 'early birds'?
And before you say, "Good!", keep in mind that not everyone has the priviledge of an all paid ride from their parents.
I personnally never had any proble getting up early, but I went to bed at a reasonable time. My peers who had trouble in the morning all tended to stay up late.
A few sources, there are tons more:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15402002.2014.96...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1111/sbr.12003
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/07420528.2012.65...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1540200070126380...
I really doubt that. Sleep deprivation comes in large part from online behavior (source: personal anecdotes). Whether or not anyone wants to talk about that is another matter.
The new law is unlikely to change the sleep-deprived status of students. Parents taking responsibility can.
There are a lot of factors that go into adolescents not getting enough sleep, and it's pretty clear that early school start times are one of them: and one that can be controlled.
Also I think suggesting that parents can take responsibility for the bed time of their teenagers is more than a little unrealistic.
[1] http://www.sleepforscience.org/stuff/contentmgr/files/94a9f6... (from 1990 about sleep deprivation in adolescents)
It is certainly stronger evidence than personal anecdotes about "teens are always on their phones".
Longitudinal studies observing that teenage circadian rhythms shift towards sleeping in later long predate "online behavior".
