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.'"
What About The Parents? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't trust her with it why don't you take it from her? :p
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.
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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.
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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!
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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 ...
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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
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Funny)
And I certainly don't want to know that nun's don't have sex. That's half of my video collection ruined.
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.
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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
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:5, Insightful)
You don't know a lot of feminists, do you?
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A completely different time? So you've found work since then that demonstrates Unwin's work as incorrect?
.... yes [wikipedia.org]?
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.
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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:5, Insightful)
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Funny)
So don't delay!
Buy your kid a world of warcraft account today!
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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.
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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
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Besides, if you pen all that angst up, it's going to explode once they're out of your house.
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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
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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.
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I call BS. Some of us, as teens, did not have sex. It's highly debatable whether that was a "choice", however.
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Horny can be handled (no pun intended) via masturbation,
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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.
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Also, because of the stigma of teen sex, te
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:4, Interesting)
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...
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If she's ready to bed, she's ready to wed. So yes, marriage is a good idea in that case. Don't gnash your teeth too much
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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
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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:5, Interesting)
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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
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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]
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:5, Funny)
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]
I already do, and the camera in my daughter's bedroom is a nice little earner on the internet.
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Daddy?
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So, the theory being: the family that's jailed together, stays together?
Re:What About The Parents? (Score:4, Funny)
They don't get sarcasm? Oh, sorry - I was getting confused with yours.
I can totally understand this (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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
Re:I can totally understand this (Score:5, Funny)
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. ;-)
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I just figured it was because your English classes were in the morning.
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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.
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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)
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?
Uhu (Score:2)
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.
Habits are driven by your biology (Score:2)
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.
Wellington High School already does this (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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)
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)
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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]
Puritan pferd merde stops it in US (Score:2, Flamebait)
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
Re:Puritan pferd merde stops it in US (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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.
Afternoon is relative (Score:4, Insightful)
Lawsuits? (Score:2)
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.
Blame the electric light bulb (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Nice documentary about this (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever happened to coal mining? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Get used to disappointment, snowflake (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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:Real World (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe instead of training them for a life of drudgery, we could let kids be kids.
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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.
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in superficial ways for no real good reason.
Like teaching young adults that pretty soon they'll be required to conform to a fixed working schedule, same as the rest of us ?
It's not about the actual timing, hell half the students will end up working graveyard shift in a call center or fast food restaurant anyway. It's about teaching some responsibility to the kids, rather than saying "hell, turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
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For all those who are against this schedule change realize that HS students may almost look like adults but they are still developing/growing and are going through a lot of hormonal changes. If it takes school opening up 2 hours later so that we ca
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They're not saying "Turn up when you like, it'll be cool".
They're saying "OK, from now on school starts at 10:00am. Make sure you're here then.".
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: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.
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10 am sounds really late to me. My school started at 7:30, which meant that the bus picked us up at 7 am. That felt like 4 years of punishment. The reason for the early start time was all the afternoon activities. School got out
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Actually, I've worked several jobs where working life did run to that timetable, so that people didn't get caught up in the morning rush caused by every job insisting that you should be sitting at your desk by 9am for no particular reason. It led to people not being exhausted by the time they got into the office because they'd been force to stand on the train with their head in somebody's armpit.
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We used to run this way. Most of the programmers would come in about 11AM, work until 4 or 5 at the office. Usually if we needed to have a meeting or they needed something from one of the other people, it worked out well to have everyone in the same place. Then they'd go home and usually work again from 10PM - 2AM or so from home. Sometimes they'd come back to the office (all had 24 hours access cards). We were able to run like this for about the first year to 18 months until the product started shippi
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Why is this an issue in a global connected world, with different timezones and artificial light? The tendency of "Millenials" would be that they accept more flexibility in work, yet fit it into their lifestyle and are allowed to shift their hours around. (teleworking, catching up hours after 5, some even come in at 7 to be able to leave at 3)...
I walk in at work between 10 and 11am. My clients know that if they book me earlier I'll show up, but am useless a
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Yeah I've noticed American schools start a lot earlier than in many other countries.
9am is the standard school start for both primary (elementary) and high schools here in Australia, as it is in the UK school in TFA. End time is typically 3pm for primary school and 3:30pm for high school (although of course, you may have extra-curricular stuff such as sport or music afterwards).
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: 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 bu
Don't forget (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)