Schoolhouse Clock!

I read an article about a movement to push back the start time for high school students. Proponents of the movement claim that scientific research shows that the natural body clock of teenagers causes them to become tired later at night, which makes waking early for school difficult. They’re tired in class, and don’t learn as much as they would if they were well-rested. So the answer to this is to begin school later in the day to give the kids more time to sleep.

Are you kidding me?

Not to sound like an old fogey, but when I was in high school class started at 7:35 and the day ended at 2:35. We might have fantasized about the school district changing the start time to accommodate our lack of sleep, but I wouldn’t have expected them to actually do so.

Girl’97 is a junior in high school. Honestly, I don’t know what time she goes to bed, other than she’s asleep most nights by 10:30. Her school day begins at 7:45. This semester she’s taking a swimming class, which just happens to be first hour. So she’s in the pool and doing laps no later than 8:00. Yesterday she swam just under a mile in class, meaning she’d done more by 9:00 a.m. than most people did all day. Luckily, Girl’97 doesn’t seem to have much of a problem managing the 7:45 start time. Sure, sometimes she’s a bit surly in the morning, but mostly she’s just fine.

Similarly, I’m quite sure that many high school students have contended with early start times for the past century or so. You know, probably since labor laws were implemented and they began going to high school instead of waking at 5:30 to go work at a job.

I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic to the tired teenager’s plight, but I’m unsympathetic to the tired teenager’s plight. And if I were sympathetic, moving the beginning of the school day back doesn’t seem like the best solution.

Districts allow students to begin later because they know that students can’t get themselves to bed early enough to get eight hours of sleep. Yet they believe that these same students will have the self-discipline not to stay up an hour later since they know they don’t have to wake up as early?

The article mentions scientific studies that show that teenagers have a later release of the hormone melatonin, causing them to frequently not feel tired until 11:00 p.m. The glow of electronic devices can further delay the tired feeling, which is problematic since according to one study 88 percent of teenagers keep a cellphone in their room.

The implication that teenagers should begin school later because their biology tells them to stay up later ignores one simple fact: teenagers don’t go to sleep when they’re tired; they go to sleep when they want to!

There are two great points of irony in the article. In one instance a school district pushed back the start of their day from 7:55 to 8:55, which means the day ended at 4:05. Now student athletes frequently skip their last class so they can make away games on time. Sleeping through first hour: unacceptable. Skipping last hour for extracurricular activity: fine.

Right?

In that school district, one girl pushed for the later start time. She was frequently late for class when school started at 7:55. Now that the school district changed the start time and the day doesn’t begin until 8:55…she’s still late for class.

It’s safe to say that tired teenagers will be a problem for as long as society demands that teenagers do anything they don’t want to do. Is that a problem? Maybe. But it’s a problem that millions of teenagers have somehow overcome for decades. They might face a bigger problem when they leave high school and discover that the rest of the world isn’t going to change the hours of operation simply because they can’t get themselves to bed.  

Teenagers are unique. They’re not little children, they’re not mature adults. They’re learning how the world works, while already thinking they know how the world works. Instead of pushing back the beginning of the day, maybe we’d be better of with a simple three word set of instructions that apply to many different situations including when to go to bed and when to get to school: Be on time.