I was an incredibly angsty teenager, mad at the world and hostile to just about everyone by default. Apathetic, grumpy, and uninterested in physical activity or the things I liked as a preteen.
After having a baby and getting very little sleep for 6 months I recognized some of my old patterns. Turns out, it wasn’t just part of being a teen, I was chronically sleep deprived. I was up at 6am most days back then, when I would sleep until 1pm on weekends. I think a lot of teens are unfairly characterized as angry and defiant when they’re operating on half or a quarter of the sleep they need.
Ah yes, I remember those accusations of grumpiness. It’s the classic “MY issues are because of the circumstances around me. YOUR issues are because that’s just who you are.” The lack of empathy so many adults express is truly concerning.
The way I see it, you’re probably freest from the ages one to four Around the age of five you’re shipped away for your body to be stored They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores And they predictin’ prison population by who scoring the lowest
So much of the education system is centered on child abuse and grooming children to accept abuse as adults
Also it’s affordable daycare for kids so parents can work.
That’s the real reason it starts early: so two working parents can get the kids out the door and then still have time to get to work themselves
https://genius.com/Run-the-jewels-walking-in-the-snow-lyrics
Knew I’d heard this somewhere. RTJ is just 💋 🤌
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My mental health radically improved my senior year when I was ahead on credits and could skip the first block of classes each morning.
the timings for school and its length were not dictated by health needs nor education needs.
it was chosen to match parents work schedule, and to aclimatize children to factory work.
so its not out of ignorance of the childs well-being, but indifference to it
it was chosen to match parents work schedule
I can’t find a good source, but from what I’ve seen its actually student work schedules that dictate school start times.
Elementary and Middle Schools tend to start much later in the day (in part to conserve buses). But local Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Club groups will often lobby for earlier high school start times so that students are out of school in time for a 5pm work shift.
In some countries the school start at 6.30 AM so that parents can take their children to school before they start work at 8 AM.
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I left school around 9th grade, did “homeschool” which amounted to basically just watching documentaries and smoking weed and now I’m one of the highest earners out of everyone I originally went to school with. From being that weird poor kid who always got bullied to being quite comfortable- life is fuckin’ weird.
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My highschool used the same blueprints as the local prison, so… yep that all tracks and they don’t even try to hide it.
And god forbid your circadian rhythm doesn’t align and you fall asleep in class.
You can get referred for a drug test because only high people fall asleep during the day.
I have always struggled with sleep onset insomnia. In an ideal world, I’d probably sleep from around 5 am until noon, and my best working hours are from 7pm until 11pm, without fail. Even when I am exhausted from forcing myself to get up early for an extended period, I’ll still perk up in the late evening, and struggle to sleep before 3am. This combined awfully with school.
I remember once that I was so exhausted, I literally fell asleep while walking, and I didn’t wake up when I hit the floor. What’s striking in hindsight is how little sympathy there was. I wasn’t accused of being a drug user, but there were plenty of comments about laziness, which is absurd given that I was obviously severely exhausted.
A friend was the primary carer for a disabled relative, and this required her to get up at 5am each day, and to get up during the night to administer medication. She would often fall asleep in class, and she frequently got detention for this (which she would then often need to skip, to ensure she could get home in time to pick up siblings from school). Speaking with her years later, she lamented that if teachers had been more sympathetic and actually tried to understand what was going on here, it might’ve led to there being formal support to care for her relative. The amount of work she was doing was absurd for anyone, let alone a 13 year old, but she didn’t know this, let alone that there were support channels to help young carers like her.
You can get referred for a drug test because only high people fall asleep during the day.
Let me guess: Murica’ ?
Yeppp
I had a friend trauma & sleep psychology profesor visiting; she said improvement of school performance with better scheduling was proven in few real life (cross-sectional?) studies.
In my 30s and I’m still mad about it.
Especially considering how much time at school was an absolute waste.
We’ve known this for decades, but almost no districts will make the changes necessary. The youngest grades (K-4 or 5) should be the first schools to start in the morning, and the HS the last.
What happens when that is suggested is people balk at either sports programs needing to be cut or the argument that the older siblings need to be out of school to babysit the younger siblings.
Yep, exactly.
Almost 30 years now we’ve known that shifting around the school schedule by roughly a max of 2 hours would result in significantly improved learning across the board, for basically 0 cost… and we don’t do it.
America is a scam.
School is conditioning for work. They need you sleep-deprived because if you have any extra energy you might use it to analyze your situation and attempt to improve it.
well modern public schools are basically glorified daycares.
awful start time policies being the norm never changes despite the massive mountain of evidence it should because parents typically need to go into work in the morning. society collectively decided shafting kids’ sleep schedules by starting school before the already absurdly early 9-5 was the best we could do on that compromise.
and to an extent, that’s true, because we’d have to reform a lot more than just schools to effectively implement this change. there just isn’t the will in the public sphere to push this.
One reason for the early starts for high schools is that by staggering the start times for high school, middle school, and elementary school, school districts can use fewer buses and fewer drivers. If all the schools started at the same (more reasonable) time, you’d need three times as many buses and drivers and each driver would only get one or two hours a day (and thus would find something else to do, making the existing shortage of drivers even worse). The district I drive for has a transportation budget of about $3 million a year - we would not be able to afford $9 million a year and still afford our administrators’ enormous salaries.
If you just started all schools later by an hour, the elementary school kids would start at 9:30 AM which would not work out very well, either.
East Asian countries solve this by having the kids take public transit; just run a few extra buses and trains on the routes kids take, then you don’t need dedicated vehicles that sit idle all day.
Not sure which ones you’re talking about, but in Hong Kong, schoolchildren just walk to school. There’s usually a school attached to each housing estate.
Japan, Korea, mainland China
I think los angeles does this too, now.
If I remember correctly most of the suggestions to account for that actually has elementary and middle schoolers start before high schoolers since high schoolers are the ones that need the most sleep while also struggling the most to go to sleep early
They don’t need to push everyone later, they just need to start the younger kids early, and the older kids later, which is the opposite of what most districts do now. Pre-teens have no problem getting up at 6AM.
Parents fight that because then they can’t have the older kids take care of the younger kids when they get home from school.
and those parents should be fought by cps
It’s not the parent’s fault the media has made them terrified of everything that they can’t let their kids just go around the neighborhood while they’re at work.
yes, but if they’re afraid of that they shouldn’t be having their other kids watch over their younger ones
What’s the alternative?
hiring a babysitter
My school district solves this by not having busses at all
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Huh, that’s curious. I’m actually a school bus driver and I’ve been driving high school kids for four years now. Your use of “transit passes” makes me think you’re not a United Statesian.
Not sure what the comment you responded to was, but I used public transit to get to my junior high. The school provided me with a transit pass for free, which was really nice. I also live in the US. I actually only took the school bus to school for first grade.
First grade - school bus 2-6 - walking and they also did not have school buses for anyone but kindergarten 7-9 - transit, they also had no school buses 10-12 - I was either driven or drove. They did have school buses, but I wasn’t allowed to use them because I lived out of the district
Now, to be fair, I had a pretty unique situation with almost all of my schooling.
The elementary school, all of the kids that went were super close and lived in a super dense area, so walking was feasible and buses were not really needed
Junior high was a “choice” school. Meaning it was part of the public system, but it had a special theme to it and students had to request to go and they only let in a few students each year. If you did they in, you went to the normal school instead. The school had a total of 90 students and so buses were not feasible, especially since all the kids came from all over the district. They provided bus passes instead.
High school, I lived outside the district and had requested to go the school anyways, and part of the agreement to allow me to go was that I had to get my own way there. My older sibling could drive my first year and then I drove myself the next two years.
Not sure what the comment you responded to was
They said high school kids don’t take school buses … like, no high school kids do, which is manifestly untrue. I actually grew up in a town with no school buses at all, but that’s because we had a big state university there and the school district contracted with the university bus service to provide adequate route coverage to get kids to school.
Yours might not, but do you really think that’s the case everywhere?
Yea that only happens because capitalism needs your parents to slave their ass off which can only happen if their kids go to school earlier than their already early starting job
Generally, I don’t think that applies to high schoolers. They can manage themselves in the morning. We should have their school start last
America also has some deep structural issues that children aren’t able to get to school by themselves. In Japan, grade school children are able to get to and from school by themselves in most of the country. In America, parents aren’t allowed to leave children unattended, and certainly aren’t allowed to let them go to school alone
Yea missed the part about high school but those time schedules pretty much sum up my primary school times as well, hence why the reply. high school is a bit of a grey area depending on the country, I agree.
Nothing lowkey about it. Shit’s fucked up.
for years my mom forced us to go.to bed at 8pm ( I only.rebel.when I was about 12). All my childhood. Mind you we didn’t had phones so we would be there on the bed in the dark THINKING. And that’s why I have anxiety.
That 22:34 on the alarm clock always made me something. Like a magic number. Now I’ll be tired tomorrow.
My high school and middle school (they were right next to each other and shared buses) started at 7:15 AM, half the year it was dark when the bus picked us up and we lived in the far south where days didn’t get super short. It was bullshit then and it is bullshit now. It was nice to get out of school before 2PM I guess.
Every year I tell timetabling “don’t inflict 9am classes on my students, it provably punishes poorer students (commute costs) and drives poor engagement”, every year they ignore me.
Many of your teachers hated morning classes too.
Since the whole problem lies with parents’ work schedule, we should all push work time to begin at 10am instead of 8am, so kids can get to school a bit later in the morning. Everybody gets to sleep a bit more. Problem fucking solved
But then I would have to work until 8pm. That sounds horrible.
7pm if you take an hour lunch, 6pm if you don’t take a lunch.
I’ve worked a 10-7 shift before. Some people hated it, but I actually loved it. I got to stay up every night to a reasonable 12-1, okay videogames with friends, slept until a nice morning, woke up and drove to work. It was by far the best work shift time I’ve ever had. It also helped that I lived 3 minutes away, so I would literally wake up at like 9, sss, then drive to work. Saved so much gas at that job hahaha. I’d fill up my Corolla like once a month as long as I didn’t visit friends too much. And I was in an apartment with underground parking, so the uv damage to my car was like nothing.
The only downside is you don’t get to do errands during the week. Which… If you plan very very well isn’t an issue, but more often than not was an issue.
