Later School Start For Teenagers Brings Drop In Absenteeism 436
krou writes "Monkseaton High School in North Tyneside, UK, began an experiment in October that saw its 800 pupils ranging in age from 13-19 attend school an hour later than normal, at 10am. Early results indicate that 'general absence has dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.' Head teacher Paul Kelley supported the idea because he believed that 'it was now medically established that it was better for teenagers to start their school day later in terms of their mental and physical health and how they learn better in the afternoon', and he now claims that the children are becoming 'happier better educated teenagers' as a result of the experiment. The experiment is being overseen by Oxford neuroscience professor Russell Foster. 'He performed memory tests on pupils at the school which suggested the more difficult lessons should take place in the afternoon. He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years — meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do.'"
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
But then again, my parents gave me repsonsibility and consequences for my actions from a very young age. It's time to stop treating young adults as toddlers, and give them a bit of leeway to be just what they are. Young Adults.
Re:Real World (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe instead of training them for a life of drudgery, we could let kids be kids.
Re:Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the reality of the "real world"? There are shifts at all hours of the day. Making everything 9-5, 8-4, etcetera doesn't even make sense traffic wise. And how will work-from-home affect things?
Now, I can agree that many kids will eventually work office jobs, but hardly all of them. And shouldn't the school day be structured in the way best times for them? I mean, it is said schools were once structured around the realities of factory life, things like hearing a period bell and shuffling to the next station and what not - but is the reality for most adults factory work anymore either?
The real-world changes. Often times because of a new generation with different ways of thinking.
Schools should be structured to teach effectively. Not to emulate the current workplace in superficial ways for no real good reason.
Re:Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
High school is not supposed to be exactly like the real (employment) world. It is supposed to teach children stuff like mathematics and grammar. If this can be done better by starting lessons an hour later and shifting the more difficult subjects to the afternoon to accomodate (what appears to be) biological facts - then great.
Having teachers, specific schedules en sitting together with 30 of your peers is not exactly like the real world either.
Clock shift Or Late Surfing / Night Parties ? (Score:3, Insightful)
He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years — meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do
I believe they start to sleep very late and thus need to wake up late, otherwise memory and concentration fail.
I've noticed such a shift with myself, when I started to go bed around midnight or 2am. Suddenly I was much less efficient at work in the morning but rather good around 5pm. No biological change. Just stupid habits.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing you can control is whether she'll have to worry about hiding her sex life (or lack thereof) from you or not. As her parent, this is up to you, but it's been my experience that girls tend to be less worried about using condoms and choosing good partners when their #1 worry is Mommy And Daddy Finding Out.
Source(s): My own rebellious teenage years.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that since my parents let me play outdoors (including both downtown and in the woods) from an early age and pretty much didn't supervise me at all from about age 12 I've clearly failed completely at life? Or could it be that the level of supervision needed is dependent on how well parents have raised their children earlier in the childrens' lives? Nah, that sounds crazy, I'd better go quit my job and pick up a good old fashioned heroin addiction so as not to become a problem for your hypothesis...
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, when I was at school, I found that all of our exams were in the morning - especially for the "harder" subjects like Math, Science and so on. The "easier" subjects like art, music and various other smaller subjects were generally at the end of the school day. I always found myself much more awake earier in the day, but that could have been from the sport we played. Generally towards the afternoon of the day, I found my attention waning and my concentration slipping greatly.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything you've done with your wife is something your little is likely do at least once. And then some.
Same shit (Score:5, Insightful)
If 10am is the new 9am then 1am is the new midnight. Give them some time to adapt and they'll still be late for school
WHat time is it ? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand. Time is that totally arbitrary number we put out, and change twice yearly, as arbitrarily. Basically, make yoiur clocks run 1 hour early. You'll feel soooo much better, if you believe what the say.
Afternoon is relative (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:4, Insightful)
Burying your head in the sand out of fear is the fast track to a teen pregnancy, knock yourself out if you'd rather have a conversation about child rearing than one about condoms when she hits 13!
Re:Now only if they had thought of this 30 years a (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the school bus really wastes time-out-of-your-life, especially if you're one of the first stops. It doesn't even really save that much on fuel, because of the way the routes are planned, the many stops and acceleration, and the sheer bulk of the thing. We really need a better option for places where walking doesn't work for whatever reason.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Real World (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not "turn up when you like", it's just been moved an hour back. It probably also means working for an hour later. I know I find it much easier to get up when there is actual daylight. Over here school and university are usually from autumn to spring with a break over summer, meaning that for a lot of the year it's dark when I get up (and over winter it's even dark again when it's time go home..).
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember when I read Tom Clancy for the first time and saw this kind of fucked-up attitude expressed by Jack Ryan -- horror at the idea of some teenage boy pawing at his daughter. It struck me then, and strikes me still now, as being a clear demonstration of sexism and bizarre Christian attitudes to sex: the daughter as father's property who needs to be "preserved" in her "innocence" and a ridiculous failure to acknowledge young women as sexual beings. You don't have to be a fan of sexual licentiousness to see this kind of attitude as deeply damaged and damaging. I think it's on a continuum with sex-related violence ("jealousy" and "honour" violence). People need to grow up. I can comfortably cope with the idea that both my son and daughter will be sexual beings. All I care about is that, as far as possible, their sexual encounters are positive: enjoyable without negative consequences.
Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Insightful)
These kids need to get over it. I'm only 6 years removed from high school now, but back then 1st period started at 7:10am and I'm pretty sure that hasn't changed since I graduated. And TFA is talking about 10am? Wow.
Guess what? If you move the start time back an hour or two, the kids will just start to take up an hour or two later. Nothing will change. I didn't RTFA, but I can almost guarantee that if they left this "start later" system in place long enough, they'd see absenteeism rise back to 'normal' levels anyways.
I don't know... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know... my experience has been that it's all a feedback loop. Sure, sleeping one hour later is going to make you happier for a month or a trimester or a year, but then you just become used to going to bed one hour later, and the cycle repeats. Now instead of going to bed at 10 PM and maybe pushing it to 11 PM now and then, the normal go to bed hour becomes 11 PM and you start pushing towards midnight on those days when you think "nah, one less hour of sleep won't kill me." Except eventually it accumulates and now you'd be happy to have one _more_ hour.
I remember reading about a study waay back, where some people were put in a house with no windows and no time to tell the time. It turned out that the natural cycle for humans is 26 hour days. Makes sense from a design stand point too. It's easier to have a margin of error as a longer cycle and reset it each day, than to try to prolong one which due to genetic variations is too short for a day. We're pretty much by design prone to shift forward over time, in the absence of that forcing it to reset at the same time. So basically you shifted one hour forward, now what? You've just created the setup to want to shift one more hour later. Then what?
Plus, think of it this way. The best hour they wake up is based on when they go to sleep, which in turn depends on other factors like what's on TV or whether their guild mates are still in a WoW raid or just if some friend is still awake and reachable by phone. Sure, if we could shift just one group of kids one hour forwards while all those factors stay the same, yeah, it should work. But if we actually shifted every single teenager an hour forward, then TV programs which have them as a target audience would start shifting one hour forward too. Because that's the nature of the free market. You don't pack your wares and leave while it's still prime time for your customers. Their friends too have been shifted one hour forward, and can plan those raids to end one hour later. Your friends are available on the phone one hour later. Etc.
The feedback loop is pretty much built in.
All those factors anchoring the bed time just shifted forward too. Soon we're back to square one: kids who hadn't had enough sleep, being barely fit to go to school at the new starting time. Soon you'll need another hour shift to get the same results as in TFA. And in a few months another. What then? Eventually end up with school shifted forward all the way to starting at 1 AM? Then what?
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:2, Insightful)
Anecdote is an Anecdote and I have dozens of my own to refute this claim.
Some girls are just born horny.
Ehrm, I take that back, all girls are born horny except for a few freaks.
Re:I only wish! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Horny can be handled (no pun intended) via masturbation, without all of the complex emotional entanglements that sex inevitably causes.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed, the general state of sexual repression in the world that makes girls think that they're dirty for wanting sex and men think that girls just don't want sex is absolutely horrible.
The day I realized that most everyone is absolutely full of shit on this matter(when I was about 14 ish) was probably the best day of my life.
I mean, if half of the species really didn't want sex how the hell would we even still be around? As best the scientists etc can figure it isn't most of the reason our species lived long enough to become dominant on the planet that we f#@$ like rabbits?
Back on topic: I like this idea. For the first 2-3 hours in the morning when I was a teenager(and even now, I just kill it with caffeine) I was nearly a zombie. Its definitely worth looking in to. Maybe everyone should start work at 10 am too ^_^.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Untrue. You have a choice: Do you want to actually, you know, PARENT your kid, or do you instead decide to panic, and thus leave that task to others. You can behave like a sane human being, and odds is, your kid will be able to talk to you, including about sex and issues surrounding it, such as pregnancy-avoidance. If you're real lucky, they might even consider your opinion borderline relevant.
OR you can run in circles, scream and shout, and thus ensure that your child will -not- ever opt to ask *you* about such issues. Instead, she'll get her information from whatever sources she has, be that the internet, films and movies, or friends.
The parents of my first girlfriend, refrained from panicking. And that was a good thing. It meant the first time she had sex, it was with a boy she knew well and trusted, someone who'd been her boyfriend for months (me), and not, say, in the backseat of some car, intoxicated after a party. It meant she took advantage of the condoms her parents had left in a drawer, and explicitly said they never count and would NOT notice if any went missing. It meant lateron she said "yes" when her mom asked if an appointment with the doctor to get a prescription for the pill would be a good thing. It meant not having to hide, being able to be who we -where-, and overall improved the entire experience for everyone involved.
Panicking is *very* rarely the best choice for a parent. Least of all about something as utterly normal as a teenager developing sexuality.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't come out and say so, but it seems to me you'er implying that making kids have sex -later- is for some reason a good thing. And I wouldn't know why. Indeed, a healthy sex life is one of the most wonderful things in life, and that is true for teenagers as much as for older folks, indeed I'd even say that my sex-life was *more* important to me when I was 17 than it is today at double the age.
But you're right; the parents (mine and hers) had a huge impact. They let us experiment in safety and security, rather than stressed out and in hiding. They provided guidance and help, for example by reminding us to consider contraception, yes we would've anyway, but people *more* often end up having sex unprotected when it happens under stress. (for example having parents who'd panic if they accidentally stumbled upon a pack of condoms in your room, isn't conductive to keeping condoms there -- which is a smart thing to do otherwise)
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Again, Anecdote is an Anecdote. Just because you did not feel ready does not mean others did not. I could give you a few dozen anecdotes that run contrary to your own anecdote.
The majority of Humans were having kids at the age of 18-16 not too long ago. Just because you imposed some silly obfuscation to the issue does not make it so.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Second News Flash: referring to them as "lusty beasts" is probably a pretty good indicator of perpetual failure to do well with them.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
I call BS. Some of us, as teens, did not have sex. It's highly debatable whether that was a "choice", however.
Re: Bus (Score:3, Insightful)
The school bus is a brand of semi-necessary evil. The system was forced to provide an option so that a parent who couldn't take their kids to school didn't wreck the kids' education.
The savings are not about fuel, they're about *saving parental time/money*. Say 15 kids on a route * 20 min parental time saved each way *2 times per day - 600 min aka 10 hours total parental time saved/day. Because of staggered distances, parent returns home, etc etc, prob as high as 15 Parental hours per day per route.
At 12 bus routes per day * # days/year, that adds up!
You're right about the first kid on the stop getting wrecked. And I assumed a "rich" system with only 15 stops per route! When a school struggles they cut bus routes, and some systems have as many as 30 stops on a route.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right.
...what, that isn't a happier thought for you?
Your daughter is completely unattractive to everyone and will probably die embittered and alone, having never known the intimate touch of another human being.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Shorter version:
Yeah, *sure* some punk kid is gonna wake up an hour early to go hanging out with gang members at 8 am. Isn't that what all the cool bad-boy teenagers do? Wake up early?
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, if you pen all that angst up, it's going to explode once they're out of your house.
Re:I can totally understand this (Score:3, Insightful)
This was true for me up until I decided to stop drinking any caffeine. No coffee, no tea, no sodas.
Suddenly waking up was like flipping a lightswitch - I go from dead asleep to fully alert and functional in a couple seconds on a bad day, less than that most of the time.
Re:Real World (Score:2, Insightful)
No, high school is a prison for teenagers. All that stuff with textbooks is window dressing.
Re:Same shit (Score:3, Insightful)
If 10am is the new 9am then 1am is the new midnight. Give them some time to adapt and they'll still be late for school
Only if the sun is a teenager, and also taking part in this scheme of getting up an hour later
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah yes, nothing quite like heading out into the world of dating to find a suitable marriage partner without any experience useful in actually making a good choice of marriage partner.
Do you WANT your kids to be married unhappily because they made a bad choice for lack of experience?
Teenagers' dating is valuable practical experience.
*I surely hope your were joking. My apologies if you were. And if you weren't, I hope your kids get lucky in their choices for their sake.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if you look at Sarah Palin it seems she's all for teen pregnancy and very much against sexual education.
The problem with burying your (or your child's) head in the sand, is that it leaves your ass (and other places) open to all kinds of things ...
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:4, Insightful)
Acknowledge that men and women do it the same amount, for the same reasons and like it equally and these daft ideas about a woman's virtue will disappear.
Except, of course, that that's just bullshit.
Look, when it comes to sex, men and women are different, and it isn't somehow bigoted or sexist to say so. It's fucking *evolution*. And the differences in male and female sexual patterns are very well documented, and exist because, in our more primitive primate days, the male and female of the species had different reproductive goals, and therefore different sexual strategies.
Only idiots blinded by a desperate need to be PC would deny this. It's simple biology, and biology doesn't really give a shit about female sexual empowerment.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:1, Insightful)
Some people are still religious, you know. You may disagree with it or not like it or think they're stupid, but they exist.
Not medically established (Score:3, Insightful)
ITYM 'socially' not 'medically'. Teenagers are not biologically predisposed to staying up late and getting up late, otherwise they would have been doing this in the 1800s. We don't evolve fast enough to have gone from creatures that go to sleep and rise with the sun to creatures who go to sleep at 1 and wake up at noon and then miraculously at the age of 22 suddenly change to creatures that go to bed at reasonable hours and wake up at reasonable hours. It is all just social custom.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, a lot of you are missing the point. They're starting school an hour later in the morning. They're not going to have extra unsupervised hours - They're going to be sleeping until the last possible minute until they have to get up and get to school.
The key here is that I don't believe this will translate into going to sleep any later. Most teenagers aren't getting enough sleep precisely because their biological clocks have them staying up later, but their school schedule has them getting up early.
Let them sleep in an extra hour and it's basically going to get them an extra hour of sleep - an actual reduction in unsupervised waking time.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
of course 20 minutes later they'll be off fucking that punk down the street cause now you've made it forbidden and forbidden things are the most appealing and they'll quickly find out how many fun things there are involved besides marriage.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't know a lot of feminists, do you?
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you consider fictional characters to be accurate examples of "Christian" behavior? Since I didn't read those novels, I wouldn't know if Jack Ryan is even depicted as Christian at all. Perhaps I should write a (very boring) novel about Slashdot trolls who get modded up to "+4, Insightful" and see if anyone defends it.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, because of the stigma of teen sex, teens are pushed to SAY that they regret sex. They are also told that they are better people if they DO regret the sex. They are told that they can have all the sex they want as long as they regret it afterward. Of course they claim that they regret it.
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's an argument for the idiocy revolving around abstinence only education.
Here we have a big proponent of it - and I rather doubt that particular stance happened AFTER her daughter got knocked up. So either she (Sarah) didn't feel it was important enough to teach her daughter, OR she tried to teach it to her daughter and failed - quite misserably.
Alright, to be fair, it turns out she's not abstinence only, but abstinence + contraceptions [latimes.com] - at least in 2006.
The problem with abstinence only education is that it's inherently dangerous. Biologically humans are sexually mature in their early teens. Essentially once we've hit puberty, we are able to procreate. To make an analogy, nature is handing out assault rifles and live ammo by the truckload to teenagers, and abstinence only education is essentially telling these teens they're not old enough to know what it is, so instead of telling them how to safely use the weapon, how to disassemble and reassemble it, clean it, put the safety on it, we're simply going to say 'don't touch it'. The only difference is, that you're not quite as likely to die, if you accidentally shoot yourself in the face.
The other problem is - where the hell are these kids supposed to learn about sex? Porn? I'm pretty sure if that's the way forward, you'll be facing a huge problem with the lack of children in 15 to 20 years, when these kids fail to bring children into the world, because they think sperm is supposed to be rubbed into the woman's tits (appologies to Dara O'Brien).
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:3, Insightful)
A completely different time? So you've found work since then that demonstrates Unwin's work as incorrect?
.... yes [wikipedia.org]?