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Education United Kingdom News

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.'"
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Later School Start For Teenagers Brings Drop In Absenteeism

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  • by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @04:40AM (#31580838)
    Teens starting school later? Who's going to supervise the teen until they get to school? Won't somebody think of the parents?
    • by Cryacin ( 657549 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @04:45AM (#31580858)
      Who says kids need to be supervised? I was left without supervision as a young adult on lots of occasions. I still have all 10 fingers and toes.

      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.
      • by santax ( 1541065 )
        Yes, but assuming you would be my daughter I would knew I could count those parts. It's your virginity that I would worry about!
        • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @04:51AM (#31580898)

          If you don't trust her with it why don't you take it from her? :p

        • by tirefire ( 724526 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @04:59AM (#31580956)
          Unless your daughter becomes a nun, she will almost certainly have sex at some point in her life. As a parent, this is beyond your control. Not only that, but you can't control *when* she has sex, either.

          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: (Score:3, Funny)

            by santax ( 1541065 )
            Ok, I know this is /. and I know we all like to explain stuff and such. But dude, you don't tell a dad that his girl is gonna have sex one day. You just don't :(
            • by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:15AM (#31581028) Journal

              Everything you've done with your wife is something your little is likely do at least once. And then some.

            • by Idimmu Xul ( 204345 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:57AM (#31581250) Homepage Journal

              Ok, I know this is /. and I know we all like to explain stuff and such. But dude, you don't tell a dad that his girl is gonna have sex one day. You just don't :(

              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: (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 ...

            • by garethwi ( 118563 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:07AM (#31581314) Homepage

              And I certainly don't want to know that nun's don't have sex. That's half of my video collection ruined.

            • by shilly ( 142940 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:16AM (#31581356)

              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.

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by operagost ( 62405 )

                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.

                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

            • by amplt1337 ( 707922 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @08:20AM (#31582380) Journal

              You're right.
              Your daughter is completely unattractive to everyone and will probably die embittered and alone, having never known the intimate touch of another human being.
              ...what, that isn't a happier thought for you?

          • by EL_mal0 ( 777947 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:09AM (#31581322)
            You know, not all teens have sex. Some of us even chose not to have sex in our teenage years. You're right that parents cant control when teens have sex, but parents can have a huge impact, good and bad, when it comes to how children think of sex and when they choose to have it.
            • by HungryHobo ( 1314109 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:44AM (#31581528)

              So don't delay!
              Buy your kid a world of warcraft account today!

              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by dwarg ( 1352059 )

                You joke, but I remember on my 15th birthday I had the option of going to a comic book and game convention, or a school dance. It was a tough decision for a 15-year-old. I ultimately went to the dance and ended up hooking up with my first girlfriend as a result of it--which surprised me more than anybody. If I'd gone to that comic convention I'd probably still be a virgin to this day.

                • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                  And I skipped my senior prom to go to the national math meet (finished 17th in my state that year). It wasn't all that tough of a decision for me. And I ended up meeting a girl there that I then dated for over two overs.
            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Eivind ( 15695 )

              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

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by trurl7 ( 663880 )

              I call BS. Some of us, as teens, did not have sex. It's highly debatable whether that was a "choice", however.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by crmarvin42 ( 652893 )
            There is a difference between an 18 year old HS student deciding to have sex and a 14 year old HS student deciding to have sex. Only one of them is of the legal age of consent in most western countries. If a child is bound and determined to have sex they will. There is little to be done to prevent it when the child is actively trying to make it happen. However, there are a lot of children (and a 14-16 year old is still a child no matter how much they protest) whom are willing to accept prolonged virgini
          • by Eivind ( 15695 ) <eivindorama@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @07:18AM (#31581704) Homepage

            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.

        • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @07:16AM (#31581688)

          Why do you worry about your daughter's virginity but not your son's? Is it somehow magically more important in daughters?

          10k years of evolution, but sexism is still running rampart...

      • The older ones should be treated as young adults, but 13, 14 & 15 y/o's need supervision (and some even older). If you want to increase the levels of tardiness & absenteeism, and speed the overall decline of adolescent maturation, you just leave teens to supervise themselves and get themselves out of bed and to school.
        • The older ones should be treated as young adults, but 13, 14 & 15 y/o's need supervision (and some even older). If you want to increase the levels of tardiness & absenteeism, and speed the overall decline of adolescent maturation, you just leave teens to supervise themselves and get themselves out of bed and to school.

          Holy crap, I wasn't supervised after 10, until after 6pm.

          There is an easy solution - if the student has more than 3 or 5 (or X) amount of absenses that year, make it school policy to c

          • by Jellybob ( 597204 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:37AM (#31581480) Journal

            My brother recently finished secondary school in the UK, and for several years before he left the school had an automated system that would send a text message to my parents if he missed registration for any lesson, and request a response. If one wasn't received, then it moved onto making voice calls to secondary contacts.

            It has a bit of a big brother feel to it, but it does mean that the parents can't claim that they didn't know it was happening.

        • by mikael_j ( 106439 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:01AM (#31580964)

          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...

          • by crmarvin42 ( 652893 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:30AM (#31581442)
            I agree that the OP is guilty of a broad generalization. Plenty of kids developed the ability to supervise themselves before they turn 18. However, unsupervised time is directly correlated with delinquent behavior. You sound like someone who developed a strong ethic early on, but many children at 14, 15 or even 16 are still highly impressionable by peer pressure, gang culture, etc. It's not that an increase in unsupervised time will always result in increased deliquent behavior in every child, but that it increases the proportion of children that will engage in such behavior, and increase the amount of deliquent behavior in others.

            Four of the 5 kids in my house participated in delinquent behaviors to some extent (my youngest sister is damn near a saint) with similiar exposure to unstructured/unsupervised time. When that time increased my youngest brother increased the amount of delinquent behavior, but it stayed below the level of police invovlement. The same cannot be said of my other sister. My older brother and I managed to keep our delinquent behavior relatively unchanged, in part becase we were responsible for watching our younger siblings during that time.

            With all of that being said... I don't believe that starting HS an hour later will be the problem they invision. The added hour of unsupervised time in the morning is most likely going to be taken up by sleep or time in front of the TV. Besides, starting an hour later in the AM means getting out an hour later in the PM. That means there will be 1 less hour between release from school and when the parents get home. I almost never got into trouble before noon on the weekends, and never during the school week. If anything I believe that this will lead to decreased delinquent behavior in the hours after school.
            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by amplt1337 ( 707922 )

              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: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Fluffeh ( 1273756 )
          That's funny, when I was going school, we used to get in there earlier just to play sport (I know, very un-Slashdot of me). Though I was rather unlikely to be absent from school without a damned good reason (one that came from my parents sadly).

          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.
        • by slim ( 1652 )

          13, 14 & 15 y/o's need supervision (and some even older).

          Just out of curiosity, what country are you in? And if the US, what state?

          I'm in the UK. Aged 11, it was pretty normal for me and most of my peers to find our own way to the bus stop, get the bus 5 miles into town, walk the rest of the way to school, then get back. The school allowed us to walk into town for lunch, unsupervised.

          At 16 you're old enough to leave school, get a job and live independently.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Forthac4 ( 836529 )

          The majority of the times I ever considered skipping school was because I was being woken up at 7 in the morning and would have prefered another 2 hours of sleep when I would have been far more accepting of the idea.

          I went through a period of roughly 2 months in my senior year where I went to sleep at 6PM and woke at around 2AM, now the absurdity of that aside, one benefit of doing so was I didn't miss a single day, wasn't late for a class, and my grades improved significantly. I believe these effects were

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by TapeCutter ( 624760 ) *
          Children turn into young adults when they hit puberty, the notion that they require constant supervision of even the most mundane aspects of life is utter nonesense. If a 13yo can't get up, fix breakfast and catch the bus to school without parental supervison then in my book their maturity is already severly retarded. You start teaching that stuff as soon as they start school by showing them there are consquences for behaving beneath their capabilities. Eg: If you have to badger your 6yo to get dressed for
    • by Jurily ( 900488 )

      Who's going to supervise the teen until they get to school?

      Who supervises them at 2am when the parents are sleeping? Why don't you start installing security cameras in their bedroom while you're at it? Oh, wait. [slashdot.org]

  • by Cryacin ( 657549 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @04:41AM (#31580844)
    I never used to kick into gear until about 11 am as a schoolkid. Even at university this didn't happen. I was just never a morning person.

    Now that I'm a working stiff, I get up at 6am every morning, but *believe* me, I'd prefer to mosey on in to work at 10 am and work later.
    • I've never had any trouble actually getting up in the morning but I'm always a wreck for the first few hours if I'm forced to get up early (the exception being if it's a weekend and I have nothing better to do than watch a movie or something but that's not exactly hard work). In my teen and college years I would get up around 14-15 (that's 2-3 PM for you americans) on weekends and it took a lot of effort to go from my teenage 9-10:30 wakeup to getting up at 7 for some lectures in college, the only reason I

      • by m.ducharme ( 1082683 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @07:29AM (#31581820)

        In my teen and college years I would get up around 14-15 (that's 2-3 PM for you americans) on weekends and it took a lot of effort to go from my teenage 9-10:30 wakeup to getting up at 7 for some lectures in college, the only reason I pulled that off was because unlike HS it was actually subjects I wanted to learn about instead of random classes that someone else had decided I needed to take and which were often watered down to the point where there was little to nothing interesting left, as an example our HS biology class seemed to spend more time learning what the leaves of different trees looked like than anything useful (come on, I don't need to spend several hours in early-morning classes to learn how to identify birch trees, they're all over the place).

        I don't normally nit-pick spelling and grammar, but what I quoted above from your post is one sentence. Please be kind to your readers and add proper punctuation! I actually tried to read that all in one breath. It didn't end well. ;-)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        I've never had any trouble actually getting up in the morning but I'm always a wreck for the first few hours if I'm forced to get up early

        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.

    • I never used to kick into gear until about 11 am as a schoolkid. Even at university this didn't happen. I was just never a morning person.

      I was the same. A lot of that was due to staying up into the wee hours working on school projects. Unlike many of my classmates, I actually enjoyed school work, and I found most all my classes interesting.

      But here's the funny bit. After staying up late to, say, do some work on a term paper, I *would* show up late to school. Picture this kid walking into school several

    • I don't know... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:38AM (#31581486) Journal

      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?

  • by santax ( 1541065 )
    Sure son, now go brush your teeth and go to bed. Else you won't be awake and fresh tomorrow when school starts.
  • by advid.net ( 595837 ) <slashdot@adv i d .net> on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @04:56AM (#31580936) Journal

    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.

    • The circadian cycle is a PLL. It does not cause you to fall a sleep at a particular time, but it drives you towards one, based on a feedback loop, with input from light exposure, notably. It might be just bad habits .. or it might be that your circadian clock is out of phase.

  • by gringer ( 252588 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:06AM (#31580982)

    At Wellington High School [wikipedia.org], they have been starting the seniors about an hour later for the last few years. It seems to work well, and the students are happier for it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      While here in Austria, most schools start at 8am. The teenagers commit less crime in Austria, therefore the Austrians teens are happier than those whinny pimple faced Wellintonians. QED.
  • Same shit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bwashed75 ( 1389301 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:30AM (#31581092)

    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

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by shish ( 588640 )

      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

  • WHat time is it ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by obarthelemy ( 160321 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:35AM (#31581114)

    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.

  • Hawthorne Effect? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:36AM (#31581118)
    I bet this is just the Hawthorne Effect [wikipedia.org]. I bet that if they had another school and told them that they were going to start an hour earlier, as they believed that this would allow pupils to get the work done and have more free time in the evenings, this school would also have shown an improvement.
    • by krou ( 1027572 )
      Really fascinating, thanks for posting that. Wasn't aware of this effect. Would give you mod points if I had them. For anyone too lazy to click on the link provided:

      The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.

      The term was coined in 1955 by Henry A. Landsberger when analyzing older experiments from 1924-1932

    • Research has shown that teenagers need more sleep than other age ranges: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7932950.stm [bbc.co.uk]

  • It's really too bad the Mayflower didn't go down with all hands instead of inflicting the Puritans on what became the United States.

    The sleep phase shift at puberty, and back again at about 20, is well documented. Simple application of intelligence would then indicate that school start, relative to childhood, should be adjust during those years to maximize students' potential to learn.

    In the USofA, however, the Puritan cultural and genetic infestation will cause the evidence to be simply dismissed, to the

    • by crmarvin42 ( 652893 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:56AM (#31581598)
      As a former baystater, I can attest to the idiocy that the puritan legacy has played on that state. However, I don't see that this has anything to do with the puritans. AFAIK, the current schedule for schools was worked out based on what was cheapest for communities to pay for. Students start at approximately 9:30, 8:30 or 7:30 depending on their grade level (Elementary, Middle, or High School) so that older children will get out befor the younger, thus providing supervision until the parents get out of work, and so that the school only needs to buy enough busses for 1/3 of the total student population in the town.

      I think a big part of the problems I've seen with the Massachusetts education system is the use of new "Progressive Education" techniques pioneered in the 60's, shown to be largely counter productive by the late 70's, but still en vogue in the late 90's (when I graduated HS). They care far too much about self esteem and student's feelings, and far to little for making the students perform. I believe that I did well in spite of many of my teachers instead of because of their efforts. Only a handful of my teachers actually challenged me, and that's because they didn't accept excuses or care too much about how a 'C' or a 'D' made me feel. Those rare grades made me feel bad, but they also motivated me to improve my performance (and not because I was getting paid for A's as many of my peers were).
  • BS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 )

    Everyone is different. You cannot paint all people with such a broad brush. There are always morning people. When I was in High School, I was up at 4AM every day (and still am) to do my homework and/or study for tests.

    For me, mornings were for learning, and afternoons were for doing. My brain has always worked that way. A late school day would have been horrible for me.

  • by binkzz ( 779594 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @05:50AM (#31581200) Journal
    Isn't afternoon relative? Won't teenagers just stay up an hour later until eventually they have the same problems with 10 am as they do with 9 am now?
  • I wonder if some teenager's parents will sue for a later start to the school day, due to the health risks to adolescents of starting early.

    After all, if "think of the children" can be used to justify all kinds of things, including taking kids away from parents, surely school systems can be compelled to shift their work day a few hours later.

  • by SomethingOrOther ( 521702 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:03AM (#31581290) Homepage

    Thomas Edison has a lot to answer for (at least for adult sleep patterns).

    Electric lighting may have given massive boosts to human productivity. However, if it wasn't for electric light, we would all be going to bed much sooner (as you can't do any real work by candlelight), and then waking up in the morning with the natural daylight. Anyone who has spent time wild camping has experienced this..... and also knows how much more refreshed they feel waking up to the wavelengths inherent to natural light.

    Of course, those that live above/below certain latitudes might argue differently when winter comes along and there is no daylight in which to do any work. You can only spend so much time in bed ;-)
  • by stevenmenke ( 1590623 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @06:03AM (#31581296)
    Here's a nice BBC documentary called "The secret life of your bodyclock" about this effect. Including a piece very similar to this specific case. It can be viewed @ http://www.documentary-log.com/d379-secret-life-of-your-body-clock/ [documentary-log.com]
  • Man, back in the good old days, when kids were ten, they went into the mills and the mines. Or on the ships. They were the ones that lit the fuses and ran because they were the smallest. They helped bring back lunch and stuff and they learned how to grow up to be real and hardy men. Now look at us.

    Repeal child labor laws before this present moral degradation is too late! I'm building a toy coal mine for my four year old in my backyard! We're going to play Black Lung and Cave In.

  • by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @07:10AM (#31581654)

    I graduated 2nd in my class, and went on to one of the top 10 engineering schools in the country. And I got up every morning on time. The trick? Eat breakfast - and I don't mean a coffee or a Snickers. Parents, feed your damn kids a real meal.

  • by tompaulco ( 629533 ) on Tuesday March 23, 2010 @09:43AM (#31583618) Homepage Journal
    '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'
    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.

"I shall expect a chemical cure for psychopathic behavior by 10 A.M. tomorrow, or I'll have your guts for spaghetti." -- a comic panel by Cotham

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