Sleep is also an interesting example of pathologies in American high schools. Why do they start so insanely early though every teacher knows that first period is a waste of time and every parent knows what happens to teenagers' circadian rhythms? The answers always seem to come down to the incentives: high school isn't actually about learning but is more about daycare and sports and the convenience of organized groups like teachers or parents, and when push comes to shove, the latter win.
Why do they start so insanely early though every teacher knows that first period is a waste of time
Because if they didn't the students' sleep cycles would shift further and people like you would be complaining that the new first period (former second period) is a waste of time.
every parent knows what happens to teenagers' circadian rhythms?
So what happens to them. I believe they tend to stay up late and be extremely night shifted. Wouldn't starting school late only make the problem worse?
http://www.oxfordsparks.ox.ac.uk/files/preferences.png
The phase-response curve of the circadian rhythm to light shifts with age, with the equilibrium position of the wake point latest in the late teens and earliest in early childhood and old age.
Sleep is also an interesting example of pathologies in American high schools. Why do they start so insanely early
As long as the "insanely early" hours do not involve starting school before dawn, this is a non-issue. Anyone can adjust their circadian rhythm by just going to sleep earlier, and/or by napping throughout the day in order to compensate for any sleep deficits; we should be raising awareness about these solutions among students. Simply starting school later would not have substantial effects in the long run, anymore than, say, changing to DST, or moving to a different timezone would.
Anyone can adjust their circadian rhythm by just going to sleep earlier, and/or by napping throughout the day in order to compensate for any sleep deficits; we should be raising awareness about these solutions among students.
No, they can't. Students do nap during the day (that's part of the problem!), and they can try but fail to just go to bed earlier. That's why they don't go to bed. If your claims were true, there would never be any problem and the experiments in changing school times would never show any benefit. There is a problem and the experiments do show benefits. You are just offering folk psychology speculation and fake willpower solutions which don't work. People are not ghosts in the machine, they are the machine, and 'just go to bed earlier' doesn't do anything about the zeitgebers and biology of the thing.
moving to a different timezone would.
Do you see why this comparison doesn't work?
the experiments in changing school times would never show any benefit.
That's not solid proof. What's relevant is whether different school times can possibly affect things in the longer run, well after the effects of the transition itself are over.
You are just offering folk psychology speculation
"Folk psychology speculation" is a good way to describe the assumption that some teenagers are just "night owls" and cannot possibly manage to retrain their sleep cycle.
'just go to bed earlier' doesn't do anything about the zeitgebers and biology of the thing.
"Just going to bed earlier" encompasses making reasonable efforts that might also involve changing these environmental cues and zeitgebers. Of course if your evening routine involves drinking strong coffee, "just going to bed earlier" might not work very well. The solution is to change that habit.
"Anyone can just do x" is an insane and unrealistic way to frame solutions to a problem. Like saying "to stop the obesity epidemic we just need to tell people they have to eat less and exercise more." or "we should tell people to save more money for retirement" the fact that you can frame a solution in simple terms does not in fact make it a non-issue.
also for much of the year in America going to school DOES in fact involve getting up well before dawn.
Simply starting school later would not have substantial effects in the long run, anymore than, say, changing to DST, or moving to a different timezone would.
Wait... DST makes sunrises and sunsets later by civil clocks, so I would expect its effects to be quite the opposite of starting school later (and pretty similar to those of starting schools earlier). Did you mean to say something like "abolishing DST" instead, or am I missing something?
Anyone can adjust their circadian rhythm by just going to sleep earlier,
No, the circadian rhythm doesn't work that way. Perhaps you don't notice because your chronotype is earlier than your lifestyle required so you never had much trouble falling asleep even when going to bed relatively early, but people with later chronotypes if they go to bed earlier will just take more time to fall asleep.
Everyone has trouble falling asleep when they're going to bed earlier than usual, at first. If you keep at it and are consistent about avoiding things like bright artificial lights, high general arousal, strong drugs like coffee and other adverse environmental cues later in the day, you'll fall asleep and your "chronotype" will shift back as intended.
So how about some actual evidence for these claims?
I mean, the medical profession has terms like "advanced sleep phase disorder" and "delayed sleep phase disorder" and "non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder" and seems to take the view that "just go to bed later/earlier/regularly and it'll sort itself out" is not a helpful response. Now, obviously, those are just doctors; what do they know? But it might be helpful to know how it is you know that they're wrong.
Or, when you say "Anyone can ...", is it possible that you don't actually mean anyone?
seems to take the view that "just go to bed later/earlier/regularly and it'll sort itself out" is not a helpful response.
I don't think this follows from what you said earlier. "Advanced sleep phase disorder" and "delayed sleep phase disorder" are indeed taken seriously as genuine problems, but they're invariably 'treated' with lifestyle interventions, such as (in the 'delayed' case) avoiding bright/artificial light late in the day, and (conversely) letting sunlight into the bedroom some time before you're scheduled to wake up. Sometimes these interventions are also aided by taking melatonin (or a comparable supplement), but come on, this is hardly a "medical treatment" in the usual sense!
A few observations.
Good schools have competition-culture. Bad schools have fields of fucks which are entirely barren. Hint: you want to be in a good school.
When you have a scarce resource (e.g. spots in a Prestigious University), merit-based competition for it (even if the merit is the ability to function well while sleep-deprived) is not a bad solution. Consider other solutions, e.g. money or power or random chance. Do you think you like them more?
It is true that not everyone can be Exceptional. Some people will end up being peasants. Do you think it will be good if their peasant-nature were pointed out to them early on and they were told "Don't dream about success, you're a peasant and your destiny is to muck around in the dirt"?
Asian kid at Irvington, wants to get into a high competition school in the US, needs to differentiate.
Strongly suspect that legally changing his name to 'Yacouba Aboubacar', listing French as a language on his application, checking 'African American' instead of 'Asian', and writing an admissions essay about the challenges of having an African name in a high-pressure academic environment would, dollar for dollar (name change fees might be close to a single sat prep class fee) be a better investment of resources than just about anything else he can do.
His friends would hate him for it, some would imitate, and maybe one or two would escalate by going for estrogen prescriprions in 11th grade and starting 'transitions' that they will abandon after submitting college applications.
I believe that the lawsuit mentioned here has merit, I don't know where it is now, and look forward to seeinf it wind its' way through the courts: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/
You may not like the admission bias in the Ivies (I do not, either - the discrimination against Asians is of course especially damning, since Asians do not even share the putative "White man's burden" of their ancestors having wronged minority ethnicities in the past, that's often invoked - however dubiously - as a moral justification for "affirmative action"), but the amount of "Yacouba Aboubacar's" being admitted in any given year is so low in practice that this does not measurably affect the arms race we're talking about here. Even doubling or trebling the number of admission spots at each Ivy would not change things much!
Exactly, you gotta differentiate. How hard is it really to build a fusor like the Taylor Wilson kid the article references did as a teen?
Just have a hook, make the news, and you'll be golden. You can't just be a smarty pants, you have to be a smarty pants and an 'oh isn't that interesting'.
When you're in a terrible game with a perverse incentive structure...either play to win or don't play. If his blog took anonymous comments, I'd suggest starting an 'Irvington community college' with the kids who didn't want to go to low prestige schools, passing the hat in that community could pay real dividends and in a generation, it might become one of those high prestige schools...I mean, if that kid is average for his high school...
Hey, author of the article here.
I actually think it'd be probably net-positive if we had people trying to go lots of different routes to differentiate themselves. This seems like the sort of positive competition that leads to good externalities. (There's an example somewhere where Luke and Scott got into an arms race for writing good articles...)
Anyway, I'm interpreting the above to say that...students at Irvington should go to community college, which will have net benefits in the long run? Not 100% sure I'm parsing the second half of your third paragraph.
The kid says that school is competitive, and that's bad--why can't they all agree to work less hard (presumably so they can have more time to play video games)? "Getting students to accept the reality that they might just not go to the best schools is good, I guess. But unless it also comes with the rallying call of engaging in a full-on socialist revolution, it doesn’t really deal with the whole issue."
This kid is the straw man conservatives present of socialism--the idea that the purpose of labor unions and socialism isn't to have a decent wage, but to not have to work hard.
There is a competition crisis, though. The problem is partly the idea that getting into an elite school is a measure of your intelligence--it isn't; they're explicit that that isn't the sole basis of admission, nor do they even have any measure of intelligence other than standardized test scores, so why not use the standardize test scores?
But it's also the allocation of social attention. Each field of study is too large now relative to the number of practitioners. Merit doesn't work anymore. There is no such thing as reputation anymore, except within a small circle of colleagues. Nobody trusts grades or recommendations. The problem isn't competition, but that we have no functioning reputation system anymore.
There's a difference between 'working hard' and actually inhumane conditions, which, while I did not experience them in high school, seem to pop up by default in a lot of situations. So I wouldn't be really surprised if it happened in some high schools, because there isn't much defending against it there.
So yeah the labor unions having the goal of 'not having to work hard' is a protection against a very serious and insidious problem.
The situations like: "Hey, I am not telling you to work so hard that you will damage your health. You would never hear me saying something like that; that's a horrible strawman. Actually, please sign these papers that you were specifically instructed to take great care about your health, so that you can't sue me if anything happens. Thank you! Now I want to remind you that if you get outcompeted by people who are less careful about damaging their health (which I officially know nothing about, because I prefer not to care about such details and only look at the outcomes), you may get fired. It's your choice, though, and I take no responsibility."
This kid is the straw man conservatives present of socialism--the idea that the purpose of labor unions and socialism isn't to have a decent wage, but to not have to work hard.
I'm not sure that there is a consistent "straw man" in a way that's relevant to this post. You might as well say: "See, this kid neatly disproves the other straw man conservatives present of socialism--the idea that the purpose of labor unions and socialism isn't to have decent workloads and working conditions, but just plain greed." Six of one, half a dozen of the other...