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Opinion | Let Teenagers Sleep In
Three out of every four students in grades 9 to 12 fail to sleep the minimum of eight hours that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for their age group. And sleep deprivation is unremittingly bad news. Anyone who talks about sleep as if it's some kind of inconvenience and getting less of it is a virtue should be challenged. These people are dangerous.
At its most basic, insufficient sleep results in reduced attention and impaired memory, hindering student progress and lowering grades. More alarmingly, sleep deprivation is likely to lead to mood and emotional problems, increasing the risk of mental illness. Chronic sleep deprivation is also a major risk factor for obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and cancer. As if this weren't enough, it also makes falling asleep at the wheel much more likely.
In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., a policy now backed by the American Medical Association, the C.D.C. and many other health organizations.
[...] Whenever schools have managed the transition to a later start time, students get more sleep, attendance goes up, grades improve and there is a significant reduction in car accidents. The RAND Corporation estimated that opening school doors after 8:30 a.m. would contribute at least $83 billion to the national economy within a decade through improved educational outcomes and reduced car crash rates. The Brookings Institution calculates that later school start times would lead to an average increase in lifetime earnings of $17,500.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 25 2018, @10:27AM (13 children)
>Three out of every four students in grades 9 to 12 fail to sleep the minimum of eight hours that
> the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for their age group.
Stop their pocket money if they go to bed after 10 pm on a school night. Switch off the router after 9 pm. No mobile phones (or computers of any kind) in bedrooms after 9 pm. Or any of a hundred other parenting things.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @11:35AM
Always hated to get up early for the bus to school, one year it came at 6:15am, ugh. Finally in senior year high school, I had a little motorcycle and drove my self to school. That year I also connected with a group of older guys who were racing cars and I volunteered to help them nearly every evening. Arranged my classes so that the first one was at 10am and had my parents write a permanent "late" note. I was a good kid, always made it in for that first class.
All the school really cared about was that I was there before 11(?), which was enough of the day that my attendance qualified for state aid (to school district) for the day. That worked very well, I got to know the staff in the attendance office instead of the sleepy teacher & kids in my assigned morning homeroom.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 25 2018, @11:45AM (4 children)
The original purpose of school ending at 2pm was because high school sports is more important than high school academics and as such has priority.
The scheduling is F-ed up such that my son's school's football team starts ALL games at 7pm. Seriously, the farthest away school in their division is about 15 miles, so I'm not sure why it takes 5 hours for the kids to be ready. However, for the families and fans, the stereotype of the pre-boomer 9-5 work hours STILL lives on, such that get outta work at 5, eat at 6, watch "the big game" at 7. Needless to say those kids aren't / can't sleep until pretty late at night, and then wake up at 5 to go to school at 6 to be in class at or before 7.
Cross country runs are generally over and the kids home by dinner time. Thats the way to run a HS sport.
Looking at things the other way, a couple percent of the kids will be in the military in a couple months or years, and they have a culture of waking up long before sunrise to exercise, ranger school is basically infantry AIT field exercises without any sleep for two months, etc. I'm just saying the toughest kids are going to stay up later and get even less sleep really soon, so...
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday September 25 2018, @02:23PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 25 2018, @06:21PM (2 children)
Not disagreeing but a tangent idea might be to make the AP and college prep type of courses into "after school clubs". I would wait for the meme of "STEM is teh greatest11!!!11" to burn itself out, then propose this.
Interesting thought experiment: My kid's cross country team schedule has little relationship with the official school year. I was one of very few kids (like 20 out of 600) in my HS senior year to take calculus; if calculus were a after school club and I passed a CLEP test or AP test or something similar (kicked ass at a math competition?) then my season should be over and I can just go home, right?
There is a graduation req of 4 years of math right now for my kids; There is also precedent that any number of the four required semesters of gym class can be replaced by a season of high school sport. I would not be amused at having to take trigonometry class again to meet graduation reqs while also varsity lettering in calculus or whatever it ends up being called.
As academics are watered down in schools and political indoc ramped up along with the long tradition of prioritizing athletics over academics, I could totally see the day when the only way HS students can experience math or science education is after school clubs.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday September 25 2018, @07:04PM (1 child)
I am all for letting people prove competency and going on with life. Like if you can pass a trig final then your high school math requirement is done. Problem is that school isn't about education, its about making an indoctrinated drones. It's not about smart or capability or intelligence or critical thinking.
In my day, everyone of every aptitude was put in the same Government class, probably because there were no pre-requisites. So the teacher had to cater to the class clown or villiage idiot and anyone of any interest or intellect was neglected until their interest was destroyed and their intellect hindered. This is just one case from across many subjects where the students are subjected to the subject instead of a system where they are allowed to run ahead with their interests and aptitudes and actuyall be great at something. Nope, anyone with drive must be driven like a square peg through a round hole until they fit the preconceived generalization of a student. I hate how teachers hate it when students think, sorry for the inconvenience of you doing your job. Teachers can do the greatest work but they more often do the greatest harm.
The STEM thing annoys me too. but it won't go away because there is so much money to be had in selling STEM and the related accessories.
I don't think math and science will be relegated to after school clubs. Well, not in name. Real science and math are disappearing though. The name of science will be kept to further agendas and build the faith in science that the followers don't even realize is bad science...Ok, nevermind, you were right, math and science are dying and you will only find it after school and probably not on campus.
Sorry, started soapboxxing. Schools are screwed.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 26 2018, @01:15PM
Originally higher ed was invented for the nobility because kids are smart enough to be quite well informed by their teens but for millennia no one has figured out a way to teach calmer lower testosterone wisdom of the mid 20s.
You'd have to find something for smart kids to do from their teens until their mid 20s, one way or another. Draft? National Service aka peace corps? Prison? Schools as prison?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @02:06PM (4 children)
This.
Why is it so hard to go to bed earlier in order to get the recommended amount of sleep?
The way it's going now, today's acceptable start time for school will need to be changed again because kids will stay up even later and not get enough sleep. It will continue to move out if limits aren't put into place. And the world is full of limits; it's good to learn how to cope with them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @02:56PM (2 children)
That's not how sleepiness works, at least in healthy individuals (i.e., absent any particular sleep disorder). Sleep is driven by an individual's circadian rhythm which is synchronized with the solar day. You don't get to choose when you get sleepy, but without external influence it will tend to be around the same time every day.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @03:03PM (1 child)
Are you suggesting that if they move the start time later, that the students will still go to bed at the same time because that is their natural sleep time? That is the assumption made in this analysis, but I'm really not sure how valid it is. I wonder if anyone has seriously looked at whether that is true or whether the students will just stay up later and end up with the same amount of sleep they get now.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 25 2018, @05:02PM
That is the suggestion according to medical literature. This is just the first search result:
http://www.medicaldiscoverynews.com/shows/crt.html [medicaldiscoverynews.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by lgw on Tuesday September 25 2018, @05:49PM
If you find that "going to bed early" works for you at all, then congrats, you are a morning person. That's pretty much the definition.
Night owls, on the other hand, don't get sleepy in the evening, and laying in bed accomplishes nothing.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday September 25 2018, @05:42PM
Meh, my parents let me stay up as long as I wanted. They'd give me 20 bucks for spending money when I'd ask, never gave me crap about what I was doing. Mind you, this was before cell phones and PCs (in the house) but we did have TV and Nintendo. I had a car to drive, and gas to put in it. Never had a curfew.
But I was expected to be up at 6AM to milk those damned cows every fucking day.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday September 25 2018, @08:43PM
Good luck with that. Actual evidence suggests that just as small children are hard wired to wake early, teens are hard wired to sleep late. Some time in the early twenties, most but certainly not all settle into a happy medium.