Students if school started at a later time: “That means later bed-time :D”
Something everyone here seems to be forgetting is that even if you are getting the same amount of sleep, sleeping at a time which fits your biological clock better is better for you. I can get some amount of sleep and wake up at 5am and be tired the whole day, and yet if I wake up at 8-9am with the same amount of sleep I am perfectly functional the whole day.
I noticed exactly this since starting WFH. Even if I suffer a bout of insomnia – where I get maybe 3 hours of sleep – just being able to sleep in to 0800 makes it so much more tolerable.
It goes from feeling tormented to just feeling rough around the edges.
God but I remember fighting to keep my eyes open at school and at work back then.
i still have to fight back sleeping anytime i am in a meeting. i actually started hallucinating once. doesnt even matter how much sleep i actually got or if its at the right time, i just automatically get tired sitting down listening to people talk
Circadian rhythms are rooted in our very cells and dominate our lives. Defying them always comes at a penalty. Adding to the complexity here is that everyone is different; social norms be damned.
Jetlag is probably the best studied phenomenon for trying to “break the rules”, and surprise, there is no remedy other than waiting a few days to acclimate to a different solar cycle.
When I was in university I designed a semester around only having afternoon+evening classes.
I slept to 11 every day, which turned into staying up to 3 each night.
There’s two parts, amount of sleep and teens have a later sleep schedule (ie night owl).
But in any case just because some may abuse it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have it for everyone else.
Uhh, yes? I think that is kind of the point. To acknowledge they do have a different sleep requirements than adults and elders.
In terms of what time they go to bed? I might be missing something here but what I meant was that they’d just go to bed since school doesn’t start that early, so they’d lack sleep again anyways.
The idea is that teenagers find it really hard to go to bed early. But school still starts very early. So they end up sleeping less than they should to function. The anti biology stance of “they should go to bed earlier” is not helpful. What’s helpful is starting school later, let them have their vigil time into later hours, then they can sleep and recover fully, and do better at school. Thus potentially creating better educated adults.
I almost want to disagree with you, but this is legitimately how my friends and I would have responded to a later start time lol
“How can we get your children indoctrinated into a 8a-5p work week if we have them go in later? We can’t have that!”
That’s half the problem though isn’t it. The parents have to work the 9 to 5 so that’s when the kids need to be out of the house as well.
Those kids typically aren’t out of the house during those hours in summer.
I thought it was easy until my kids’ school system tried to do it.
The bus drivers all quit. The only reason they took the job was because it was early and they could start a 9-5 job after their bus drive.
After delays and rescheduling, many schools in the district now start earlier than they did before they tried to make them later.
Don’t they have to also pickup the students in the afternoon?
How the hell could they have time for a 9-5 in addition?
Also a tertiary function of schools is to act publically funded daycare. Moving the handoff later in the morning means that parents would also need to start work later, or take on fewer hours.
Not saying that wouldn’t be a good thing, but there are knock-on effects that go beyond the clout of a school to tackle.
Or we could design our cities and towns to allow kids to commute to school on their own.
That’s one great idea! But also not something public school boards have any control over
Middle and high schoolers sure, but elementary schoolers, especially kindergarten and first grade? I know plenty of parents who wouldn’t let their kid walk down the street to school at that age.
Still, if there’s one thing America sucks at, it’s having people do healthy things. I’m very grateful I WFH, for now, and don’t have to wake up until 10AM.
So hire other bus drivers, or just have kids take the regular bus. Where I live there’s no such thing as a school bus.
That’s impossible in almost all of the United States. There is no regular bus system in most of the country
Hiring takes time. It also required a lot more money than was budgeted because you need people who don’t have a 9-5. And lastly, not everyone lives in the city where there are buses.
Buses can function fine in towns as long as the town is designed well. Very few people live in areas too rural for public transportation to function.
It actually really is that simple. Design cities and towns so that kids can safely commute to school on their own and you’ve solved the problem.
We lived in a city where high schoolers take public transit and that worked well for them, but the district could never hire enough drivers for the elementary and middle schools. Even with the drivers they had, they had to stagger school start and end times so that buses could do multiple routes. Some schools started at 7 and others at 9. Then the problem you highlight comes up, that there are only a few hours between shifts, so it was harder for drivers to have a second job. Many drove Uber between.
I have a hypothesis that adolescents staying up late and the elderly waking up early is an an evolutionary holdover from a time when someone needed to be awake to watch for lion attacks.
Need as in, for a healthy body and mind?.. Hardly needed if we can breed fresh meat for the economic grinder on less sleep!
