Sleep
Posted by Matt Zeitlin on October 16, 2007
I’m writing this now because I don’t have class until 9:20 - here’s Ezra Klein on the virtues of sleep:
We also get some data on the commonly heard, and totally accurate, complaint that schools start too early. “in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis…the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable.”
In middle school and the high school I would have gone to, class starts at 8:05, while at the school I attend now, classes start at 8:35, and if you’re lucky, you can a first period free at least once a week. Speaking as a sleep starved teenager, those extra 30 minutes in the morning are incredibly valuable. How any school could ever start before 8:00 is simply astounding and probably proof that teachers or some other force has become too powerful in the district, because starting times that absurdly early are never in the interest of the students.
October 16, 2007 at 9:23 am
Don’t these early start times have more to do with sports than anything else? That is, ending school early enough so you still have some daylight left to hold practice.
October 16, 2007 at 11:51 am
First period in high school began at 7:20, so I was usually at school by 7:00 or 7:10 (you can use the 20 minutes to do the homework from the night before). That meant school was out by 2:20 (the logic being that the middle and elementary schools students, excused at 3:10 and 3:30 respectively, would have older brothers and sisters home to watch them).
But elementary school started at 9:00 and middle at 8:20, which is exactly backwards for childhood sleep cycles; older kids need more sleep and find it harder to wake up earlier, whereas small children will gladly wake up at 6:30 in the morning to watch “Spiderman and His Amazing Friends” and cram Coco-Puffs into their screaming, pre-adolescent mouths (at least I was).
October 16, 2007 at 12:27 pm
You think that decision has something to do with teachers, who generally arrive at school at least an hour before the children?
As John Cain noted — it probably has a lot more to do with athletics and other afterschool stuff, as virtually every tyke from Kindergarten on takes piano, or plays soccer, or baseball, or has something to do after school that mandates he can’t be stuck in a classroom past 2:30 or 3:00.
Once you hit highschool, those kids are in the school band, or on the school team, or in the school play — so school can start later, since they can just go straight to practice right there at school.
I know lots of elementary teachers — I can’t think of any who wouldn’t praise you to high heaven if you moved first bell to 8:30 or 9:00.