
Schools Are Slow to Learn That Sleep Deprivation Hits Teenagers Hardest - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/upshot/schools-are-slow-to-learn-that-sleep-deprivation-hits-teenagers-hardest.html?ribbon-ad-idx=6&rref=upshot&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=The%20Upshot&pgtype=article&_r=0
======
sgentle
I predict this will be a difficult sell, for the reasons pg outlined in "Why
Nerds are Unpopular"
([http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html)):

> Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in
> an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as
> they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the
> weekend.

Schools are government-subsidised daycare first, educational institutions
second, which is the reason they often fail at teaching students but rarely
fail at keeping them in place.

From that perspective, why would you change a child's school hours to anything
less compatible with their parents' work hours? If anything, I would expect
the trend to be towards longer hours at school, perhaps by more tightly
integrating after-school activities.

~~~
aab0
There's also the much-cited football problem: if high schools ended at a more
reasonable hour like 3PM or 3:30PM, this causes problems for football coaches,
who might see their after-school practices running to 6PM or something.

I'm reminded of how my school district carefully made sure that the austerity
or budget-freeze budgets which happened when voters failed to approve their
preferred budgets always just happened to not have enough funding for
football...

~~~
tedmiston
> There's also the much-cited football problem: if high schools ended at a
> more reasonable hour like 3PM or 3:30PM, this causes problems for football
> coaches, who might see their after-school practices running to 6PM or
> something.

I checked my high school and others districts to confirm they operate on an 8
am - 3 pm schedule +/\- 30 minutes. Is this uncommon?

~~~
danieloaks
Same over here in Aus, those are standard hours for most every school I've
seen.

~~~
_kyran
Little later in my experience (vic) 9am to 3:20

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That's standard UK primary school (4-11yo) hours too.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
And pretty much the same for secondary.

5 _60 min or 6_ 50 min periods, 45 min lunch, 15 min morning break. 6 hour
minimum day. Any extra time is padding for registration or longer breaks.

------
cesarbs
Going a bit off topic here (since my kid is still in elementary), but I wish
schools started later for more selfish reasons. Our kid naturally wakes up
early but the Mrs. and I are night owls. We've been miserable since our kid
started going to school. We've been trying to force ourselves to go to bed
earlier than its natural to us, with varying degrees of success, but most
weeks are spent half asleep most of the time because waking up at 7am just
doesn't work for us. I can't wait for middle school when the kiddo will likely
be old enough to wake up on her own, fix herself up and go catch the school
bus.

~~~
Evenjos
My parents were night owls, and so was I. Waking up before dawn was a
nightmarish hell for me, all through junior high and high school.

~~~
trill1
Same here. I surfed the internet and played computer games until 1 or 2 AM
every night, and then spent a lot of time in junior high and high school
nodding out in class.

I really learned almost nothing, which isn't the fault of my teachers or
anyone else. I would have been better off in a radically less structured
educational environment, something as simple as being put in a room alone with
some books and an offline computer for 4 hours a day, with long breaks in
between to exercise and socialize.

------
carsongross
It is absolutely ridiculous that we make growing humans get out of bed before
8 AM. Pubescent teens should be sleeping 10 hours a night, particularly boys
who are in their growth spurts.

When I am emperor dictator, no schools open before 9AM.

~~~
reustle
But, then people will just stay up later. I know that's what I did as I went
through schools / jobs. My last job I could get there around 1030am (wake at
9:45~) so I would make sure to get to bed around 2am.

~~~
bendykstra
Your personal experience doesn't comport with the findings of sleep
researchers. Later work or school start times correlate with increased sleep.
This is due to biological influences on behavior (people feel tired at night
and go to bed.) To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at
6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?

~~~
reustle
Well my father worked 3rd shift when I was a kid, and he slept through the day
time while I was at school. So, yes?

~~~
ascorbic
Was he tired all the time? It's been shown that shift workers never fully
adjust to sleeping during the day. Children and teens need a lot more sleep
than adults, so it's particularly hard for them. As a teen I worked in a
bakery and later as a pastry chef, both of which involve very early starts. I
loved the work, but that early alarm never got any easier.

------
YZF
My 16 year old home-schooled daughter wakes up at noon... By the way, where I
went to school we had 7am (!!!) classes ... I used to sleep in and just skip
them as a teen ;)

My personal schedule as an adult is to start working around 10am. Oddly enough
when I am on vacation I tend to trend towards getting up earlier. If I need to
get to work early for a meeting e.g. I tend to feel very tired the entire day.

I think some lot of this is related to how our sleep patterns are screwed up
by artificial lighting. When we go camping we generally don't have fires and
we go to sleep when the sun sets down and get up when it comes up. It all
feels very natural after you've done a few days of that...

~~~
peferron
Try camping one full year in Ireland (beautiful country) and see how natural
it feels to sleep 7 hrs in summer and 17 hrs in winter. And Ireland isn't even
that far north.

------
Bedon292
What I have been wondering is, do later start times really help teenagers? I
know when I was going to high school, if I was allowed to sleep in for an
extra two hours, I would have stayed up two hours later at night. Meaning I
got the exact same amount of sleep. Is this not common? Or does later start
time actually lead to more sleep on average? Also, the homework load does not
get lighter, so the amount of time they have to stay up to do the homework
stays the same. The start time just shifts to later in the day. Is there any
research out there that shows changing start times does anything other than
shift the entire schedule in the day? With the exact same amount of time spent
at school, time doing homework, sleeping, etc.?

~~~
meesles
The thing about sleep is, it's not a factual, hard science thing. Different
people need different amounts. Different people feel better waking up at
different times. Having a schedule and sticking to it makes you feel more
refreshed. Hell, some people barely sleep and seem to be fine. Personally, I
can sleep 8 hours and still feel like crap having to wake up at 8AM. If I can
sleep till 10, I wake up much more refreshed and immediately ready to start
working.

In my mind, the only ideal solution for kids is a much more flexible schooling
system that runs from the earlier hours to the later ones. Students would be
able to select their classes (there's never THAT many in grade school) based
on times that are convenient for their mental health and living arrangements.
So Suzy could wake up and start classes at 8 and go home at 3, while John, who
like me hates early mornings, could start classes at 10 and go home at 5. Of
course, a bunch of organizational problems come up and let's not forget that
anything run by the government is dreadfully inefficient, but in an ideal
world, I think this kind of system would work.

~~~
Bedon292
Right, I am the same way. Not at all a morning person. I, don't want to get
out of bed before 8, at the earliest no matter how much sleep I get. That is
why having flexible work hours is important. Many of my co-workers have been
at work for 2 hours before I wake up. But that's what they like to do. So
nothing wrong with that. Having flexible school, at least for high school
teens, would be a really interesting idea. Though like you said, scheduling
issues would probably be too complicated.

------
japhyr
> Perhaps more important, the number of car crashes by drivers 16 to 18 was
> reduced by 70 percent when school start times were changed from 7:35 to
> 8:55.

This is what stood out to me. I'd like to know more about how this study was
done, but if it's valid this is one of the most compelling arguments I've seen
for changing school start times.

~~~
codingdave
I suspect it might also have something to do with letting all the rush hour
traffic get to work first, THEN let teenagers drive around town. Whatever the
root cause, if later start times are safer, all the more reason to support
making changes.

------
nod
Seattle Public Schools, for one, has taken this to heart and rearranged the
schedule for next year. Elementaries now get the early starts, and the high
schools will start at 9:35 AM.

------
Matt3o12_
As a late sleeper (and a high school student), i've found a way to make the
8am classes (waking up at 6:45) more bearable. I used to go to bed at 12 and
was tired all the time since I did not get the 7 1/2 hours I needed. When I
had classes late (twice a week, waking up at 8:15, 8:45 respectively, and
going to bed at 1am), I still felt tired because I did not sleep much the days
before. What I do now is go to bed at about 2am and nap for 2 to 3 hours a
day. Once I got used to it, it worked out great. I am not tired in the
mornings at all and can make it though the whole school day. At 5pm, I start
getting tired and that's when I starting taking my nap. At 9-10pm, after
dinner, I start doing my homework for which I now have plenty of time and I'm
not even tired.

That might not work for everybody, but I advice everybody to try out what
works best for them.

~~~
throwaway41597
I tried that when I was your age and it didn't work that great for me. I did
it because I was just so tired after school that I crashed for hours when I
came back. My problem was that I overslept (2 to 4 hours) during the nap and I
felt so refreshed I wasn't tired until 2am. So I ended up sleeping only 5
hours for the night, pretty much like you. On the other hand, I was still
tired during the day.

My point is that naps are good but at some point they're harmful for your
night, and 3 hours is getting close. I believe it's better to keep at least
7-hour nights and have 30- to 90- minute naps. But the truth is that school
hours are poorly designed.

This is a kind of biphasic sleep by the way.

------
jschwartzi
My high school started at 730 am. They always gave bus scheduling as the
reason they couldn't have a later start. Basically, the district only had so
many buses to allocate for pick-ups, and would stagger start times to make
sure the bus count was minimized.

~~~
reustle
I mean, it is a valid reason. My small town (4k~ people) did the same, high
school started at 7:45am and each bus had both a high school / middle school
route, and immediately after an elementary school route. Not only would you
need twice as many busses, you'd need twice as many drivers. The cost
difference is massive. That said, that doesn't mean they can't bump the start
time of all the schools up an hour or two.

~~~
saulrh
There's an even easier solution to that: IIRC elementary school kids are way
more resistant to sleep deprivation than teenagers, so you can just flip the
schedules around and start elementary school kids before teenagers. Downside
is probably then that the more-demanding elementary school kids get home
earlier, but I think they're already getting home well before the working
parent does.

~~~
jacalata
I've heard that the reason this isn't the default is that parents get far more
upset about making an elementary school kid get up and wait for a bus in the
dark than a teenager.

~~~
Pingviini
Makes sense too, America is way too dangerous to have kids wait for buses in
the dark. No doubt they would be kidnapped almost immediately.

~~~
monocasa
Can't tell if sarcastic or not.

~~~
saulrh
Poe's Law strikes again.

------
superobserver
News flash: the educational system is utterly broken and still has old
throwbacks to America's agrarian past.

Remembering when I was a teenager not too long ago, I could have told you the
same. To this day, however, I am a night owl, which has also been shown to be
more common in more intelligent persons,[0] so it really is a potentially more
hard hitting situation to those brighter than average as well.

[0]
[https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=vpsd64gAAAAJ&citation_for_view=vpsd64gAAAAJ:_FxGoFyzp5QC)

------
dcgoss
I'm currently a sophomore at Harriton High School in PA. Here's what my day
looks like. Ideally wake up around 6:20, sometimes I oversleep to 6:40-6:50.
Wake up, shower, breakfast if there's time (when I wake up too late, I'll grab
some Clif bars on the way out). Run to bus stop, bus comes at 7:02. School
starts at 7:30. 6 classes a day, an hour each. Lunch starts around 10:45.
School ends at 2:40, sports start at 3:00. Sports normally go until 5:30,
occasionally 4:30. I go to bed around 11:30-12.

------
adamnemecek
Let's not even talk about the fact that educational system is extremely
inefficient and is prone to wasting student's time. One would think that after
spending 6-8 hours a day for 12 years that you'd come out somewhat
knowledgeable about something.

~~~
kuschku
You are if you come out of high school.

You understand the global history since the neolithical times rougly, and your
own contintents history since the 1500s pretty exactly.

You understand how algebra, analysis, stochastic work, and can do simple
mathematical proofs.

You know the laws of physics, how and why things work, you have learnt general
and special relativity, and even know parts of quantum mechanics, including
being able to work with the probability functions of electrons.

You know basic chemistry, understand what each element is, know a large part
of organic and inorganic chemistry, have experimented with it, and can explain
why some molecular bindings work, and why some don’t.

You speak fluently 3 to 4 languages, and can read standard literature in them,
as well as being able to write essays about cultural topics in them.

You have had PE, know how to play a majority of sports, and have a physical
condition where you are able to play them.

You know the historical styles of art produced, and when and where they were
produced, and have experience working in a majority of styles yourself.

You know how our political system and our economy works, and know how to do
accounting and taxes for yourself. You know how to start a company, and the
trade offs of different types of incorporation.

You are able to work in teams, can delegate work, know how to learn things
from existing sources and do your own research, how to write scientific
papers, can debate with others in a civil way.

________________________

Excerpted and translated from the curriculum for high school students in the
German state of Schleswig-Holstein, 2012.

(And I can attest that what I learnt in school fits this description)

~~~
tinco
This roughly matches what is expected of a high level student in The
Netherlands. Note that The Netherlands (and I think Germany as well)
segregates students with a learning aptitude test.

This means for example that my sister who is more artistically talented than I
am was sorted into the high school track that is shorter, teaches only the
very basics of these topics. Her highschool track ends at 16 and students are
expected to go into a college that teaches some kind of physical skill, she
did graphical design, and after that got accepted into an academy of arts.

In contrast I went to the highest highschool track, did everything parent post
mentioned, did that until 18 (6 years) and was then expected to pick a higher
learning college (which we call university) to which you are generally
automatically accepted if you have a higher learning high school diploma.

I often wonder how the US deals with this. My sister would be severely unhappy
at my highschool being constantly confronted with topics that would be hard
and uninteresting to her. I would likely be bored and vastly unqualified for
proper university if I went to hers. How would you put us in the same
classroom? ( though I would have loved to go to the same school as her, she
rocks :) )

~~~
tlunter
While I wouldn't say I learned all of this, we did cover quite a similar set
of topics during my schooling. It's not everywhere that schooling is bad in
the US. Not every school just lumps all of the kids no matter their aptitude
into the same classes. A lot of schools have many levels of placement that are
to help understand the baselines a student can be held to. For most math and
science classes I took the top classes and felt it was a great pace (most of
the time) and learned quite a bit. For history and English/grammar classes
where I'm not as strong, I took a middle level class and still learned much of
the same material but at a slower pace.

For cases like your sister, there was options for classes to be taken. She can
take many different art classes over the course of a couple years to help
build a portfolio for submitting to colleges. I on the other hand had 2 maths,
2 sciences, and an English class my final semester. It was great since it so
closely aligned with my college studies and helped me get ahead (AP). I never
felt difficulty in college having taken these APs either.

Just setting the record straight, it's not the complete Wild West over here.
Just some schools are stronger than others. My school is pretty standard as
far as schools in south east Massachusetts go.

~~~
tinco
Cool thanks! Just to clear it up, I didn't think it was a complete wild west
out there. Clearly the U.S. has many of the best universities in the world,
and similarly many of the best arts academies so somehow it's able to produce
well prepared students. I was just a bit confused on how exactly.

------
robg
Crazy to me there's no precedent to talk of stress and sleep together. The
word stress doesn't appear in this piece.

Stress and sleep are the same physiological system. The best way to recover
from stress is to sleep. Not surprisingly, increasing stress also inhibits
memory, learning, and attention. So by driving a stressful lifestyle with few
hours of sleep, students are working against the need to strengthen the brain.
Sleep literally seems to refresh us, consolidating new memories and washing
away built up toxins.

Don't set an alarm clock - set a time to sleep.

------
wolfgke
Let's assume that everybody has his own natural sleeping schedule (so also
teeangers). With ubiquitous internet why can't one stream the school lessons
via internet from home so that everybody can start his/her schoolday when he
wants to and only comes for the tests etc. or school activities that involve
personal attendance (this could easily be scheduled on afternoon).

This could also probably reduce the wasted time of going to school and going
home, if you only have to go their where personal attendance is necessary.

~~~
kuschku
Because school isn’t a streamable activity, and hasn’t been for several
decades.

School today works in a way where the teacher doesn’t teach the students
things directly, but where the students try to explore and understand
themselves in small groups, with the teacher only giving hints.

This technique started in the applied sciences, where the concept of giving
students a task, like "find out what this material is" (chemistry), and
letting each group then design an experiment on how to test it, and then –
after they succeeded or failed – letting each group present their results to
the others.

Nowadays, it’s used in almost all classes, from language classes to math, from
PE to compsci.

Streaming such classes – which are the majority in todays schools – would be
an impossible task.

EDIT: Again, if you downvote, please comment why you did so – an open
discussion is always better than just plain downvoting, as it helps understand
why you disagree.

~~~
codingdave
Even if we accept you premise that all classrooms work that way (which is not
a universal truth)...I don't see why that would make streaming impossible. On
the contrary, it would make it easier. Self-paced exploration online, with
collaboration with a teacher or peers as needed. If lecture-style teaching is
appropriate for a topic, it can be recorded and streamed, and the student
could always pause it, replay, or ask a question in realtime before moving on
in the video.

FWIW, Not only is streaming education possible, it is already happening in the
home-schooling world, and k12.com comes to mind, which is driving online
education in public and private schools. Trust me, I attend educational trade
shows, and I see increasing number of vendors in this space. And yes, some of
this is moving to the traditional classroom, but we are a few years off of it
being common.

~~~
kuschku
All of these things require _working with others in groups, physically_.

You can’t work on an experiment in chemistry or physics or biology via
streaming together (aside from the fact that buying all the required materials
is a financial impossibility).

How is playing an excerpt from a theatre play in groups possible online?

Almost all language and scientific education requires direct interaction.

> it is already happening in the home-schooling world

Which is something that most nations have declared as "not properly fulfilling
the right to education of the child".

________________________

I’m seriously questioning how you propose kids do scientific experiments or do
theatre plays, etc in groups via online education.

~~~
codingdave
You have a valid point that some subjects do require interacting in real life.
Good thing I never claimed that ALL education can be handled online, and was
just showing that some education can and does happen via online streaming, and
it increases every year.

As far ALL things require physical interaction... no. That is simply untrue.
Some do, not all. You gave valid examples of some that do, and I agree with
those. But you are approaching this discussion with absolutes and tossing the
word "impossible" around enough that I want to respond with quotes from the
Princess Bride.

------
dudul
That's something I'm still trying to wrap my head around since I moved to the
US. Some classes start before 8am, sometimes closer to 7am. This is insanity.

When I see the school bus picking up kids in my neighborhood at 6.45 I feel so
sorry for the poor bastards. A buddy once told me that they start so early
because they need the buses later for little kids.

And it has other bad impacts. They most likely get breakfast around 6am. How
can they keep it together until 12pm? So of course, they snack on a bag of
Cheezy Poofs in the morning. Doesn't help with good eating habits.

------
sullstice
I think when it comes to schools and large institutions like universities,
their term should be:

"Too big to succeed"

We need education to be able to change fast and adapt. Something we clearly
cannot get with these large institutions.

------
Shivetya
I am under the impression that even if you move the start times back
eventually the teenagers would adopt to it and they would still have
insufficient sleep.

Perhaps school six days a week with shorter hours for more days per year? Or
just full year schedules with shorter days as you increase in grade?

Schools cannot adjust for the schedules of their students times simply because
there are too many variances. Start times will simply be followed by changes
where the advantage wanted gets lost

------
jdmichal
So if schools start later, what about all those high school students that have
jobs? Because, you know, some families _rely_ on that income. This has always
been the reasoning I heard for starting high school so early.

------
_pmf_
How very convenient that we have schools as a catch-all scapegoat for
everything that is wrong with society. I'm sure teachers are enthused about
getting lots of tips by armchair experts about how they should do their work.

~~~
adrusi
School is an institution that occupies every child full time from age 5–18.
Even when they're not physically in school, school dictates the structure of
their life.

So nearly all of our population experiences their most impressionable, value
forming years under the influence of schools, which almost all operate in a
similar way. You'd expect this to have a profound effect of behavior, on the
level that religion can have. So yes, schools make for a good "catch-all
scapegoat" because the impact that they have on society is so large that for
any given problem with society, you can probably find a quite reasonable
causal link from schools.

The term "armchair expert" is used to make anti-intellectual arguments. It's
usually not hard to tell the difference between someone arguing a carefully
considered position and someone who's just hastily defending their ideas
against new information, or whatever it is that people do. Don't lose the
signal in the noise. If you don't consider any of it signal, then there's no
reason to be in this thread.

But it's not like teachers are especially qualified in this area. Some are
because they consider it a professional obligation to keep up on such
literature and have an informed opinion on the issues the encounter, others
simply because they're naturally inclined to care about these matters. But
teachers in the US only need a bachelor's degree and a teacher's vocational
training. Having a bachelor's degree doesn't make them any more qualified than
the average HN commenter, and the vocational training typically doesn't bother
with child psychology or pedagogical philosophy. The only factor that makes
teachers any more qualified to speak on this than HN commenters is their lived
experience working as a teacher. Such experience is subject to bias, for
example, selection bias favoring the way thing are because the ones who
disagree never became teachers or got fired. More importantly, though, it's
not very exclusive experience. Everyone has a reasonable amount of experience
with the education system from their 13 years in it as a student. People also
get to experience working with children from an adult perspective when they
become parents.

------
known
Schools in Japan don't have this problem

------
clevernickname
about fucking time common sense caught up with academia

------
honua
Why did you bother having a child then? Really? You're excited until they wake
up by themselves, get ready and go away? So what's the point of their life and
yours intersecting? A few minutes after school to say 'hey' before they go off
to do homework and sleep?

I appreciate that not everyone can do this, but my wife and I home school our
daughter, and one of the very things we talk about is that we're glad we don't
have to wake up earlier than our bodies need to get the child somewhere.
That's not the main reason we home school, but it's a nice benefit.

Edit: I meant to add that the main reason we home school is to get to spend
the most amount of time with her as we can. It's such a precious time and I
wouldn't want to see her gone most of the day.

~~~
dang
> _Why did you bother having a child then? Really?_

This is unduly personal and not in the spirit of civility which is supposed to
govern this site. In fact it's a downright nasty response to cesarbs's
perfectly cordial comment. Please don't post like this. If you'd left (or
edited) out the first paragraph, the comment would have made your point
without putting someone else down.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410231)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
kuschku
By the way, @dang, is there a specific amount of karma after which I can post
comments more often?

Most of the time I get questions as comments to my comments, and can’t answer
them because of "You are submitting too fast".

So I type my answer to that comment, leave the browser tab open, and wait an
hour to submit it.

This obviously makes discussion with others quite problematic, and I’ve even
thought about starting a second account just to be able to answer other
comments with less than a few hours delay.

(Ironically, this comment was also posted in a similar way: I wrote it 2 hours
before posting, but had to wait again and again for the "You are submitting
too fast" to end).

~~~
dang
This is the sort of thing that the site guidelines ask you to send to us at
hn@ycombinator.com.

