I remember my freshman year at Clemson my dad suggested that I retake calculus even though I already had the AP credit because it would be an "easy A" for GPA sake. It was 8am 4 days a week.
After the first test was failed for not showing my work I dropped the class. My grades in every other class went up after that (next class was closer to 11am) and I never took another 8am class during college.
I don't remember why I took Calculus my first year, but I skipped every class after the first one, because it was painfully boring. I could pass the class with the final alone, and didn't care about the grade very much. Anyway, by skipping class I didn't know the final was rescheduled!
Luckily the professor let me take the final on my own later in the library, though he'd thought I had skipped it because I had a near-zero on the quizzes that were worth a few percentage points going into the final. However, there was a section on Taylor series which I hadn't seen before on the final, so I was certain that I had bombed it.
I wrote a long email talking about possible summer projects or something, so that I'd have the prerequisites for the next year. I got back a cheery email, "don't worry about it, you got an A, enjoy your summer!", and explaining that the Taylor series was kind of an extra to see if anyone could figure out the material that wasn't part of the course while taking the exam.
Obviously, I'd taken a lot of unwise risks, but I guess I got lucky with a professor who identified with an immature student who knew the material but had only taken a course because it was technically a prerequisite for something else.
I was an academic rockstar (the high school Physics lab was named after me for 10 years because I aced the NYS Regents and got a 5 on the AP, first student in the school's history to do so) ...until I was sunk by Calc 192 at Cornell. (TWICE.) Taylor and Maclaurin series is what finally did me in. (They were not "optional" in calc 192.) That and the 8-hour-long problem sets. (Yes, 4 hard questions per problem set would take about 8 hours in total to work out. Buzzkiller.) Know how often I've seen Taylor or Maclaurin series needed in my CS career since? Fucking never. It's pure weed-out material, IMHO.
Also, you got an A in the most efficient way possible in that class, in my opinion. THAT is intelligence in a nutshell! At least on my IQ ruler, lol
Obviously you've never done any fluid dynamics. I remember thinking Taylor series were stupid too, until I got into upper division meteorology courses. It's pretty much all we do, because hey, our initial conditions have most of the error. Taylor series are super important to numerical modeling. You may not have come across it in the wild, but I assure you many FORTRAN hackers have.
Sort of an "out there" question: Fluid dynamics sounds interesting. Is there any, eh, "fun, interactive" fluid dynamics simulation thing I could check out? Basically, playing with someone else's model instead of modeling things myself
Lately, programming for a company that does online surveys. It's not glamorous, but it is data analysis and intellectually challenging enough. Other than that, I've worked on the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. I help run a nonprofit wiki farm at miraheze.org, where I'm the security specialist. And I'm getting sidetracked in politics once again.
Too many side projects means I wasn't really focused enough to get a graduate degree, but hey, you have to live life as you want, and go after the things that make you happy.
I guess success depends on your goals. If you just want that degree so that you can go out and get a job as fast as possible, then by all means. If you really want to learn everything the school has to offer to enrich yourself, then you can do that too. If you're paying for it, and you get what you want out of it, I don't really see a problem either way.
I had a REALLY hard time in MATH 1910. A lot of people came in with private school educations and breezed right through it all. Meanwhile, I felt like I was struggling to catch up on the very basics such as L'Hôpital's rule because my high school was just okay but not great.
I started with a B- after the first prelim (which was the median grade), had to go to tutoring at the Math Support Center in Mallott and go to office hours, and after all that, I managed to somehow bring up my grade to an A- by the end of semester. Even still, it was VERY stressful.
I wonder how you must have handled having to retake the class. I would've been losing my mind from anxiety if that happened.
They are separate courses. I didn't have any AP Calculus credits so I had to take both.
At some point (I think a few years before 2008?), Cornell also renumbered the courses by adding an extra zero to convert them to four digits (as required by the new PeopleSoft course management system).
I have a kinda similar story. I've always had the ability to learn something really, really quickly. Like 4-8 hours I could learn almost any technical course. Calculus was different though. You couldn't just learn how to visualize things and learn the rules and apply them. Integration couldn't be "flow charted" you had to just recognize the pattern!
So I'm up all night before the final trying to get through this material. Then I hit the Taylor and Maclaurin method of turning every function into a polynomial. It was difficult to learn, but at least it was straightforward once you got the trick of it.
Due to coffee related stomach sickness the final was rescheduled anyway so I learned a good deal of the patterns for the integration but what I ended up doing was using Taylor series if I got stuck since I could just convert it to polynomials, do the integration, then try to convert the infinite series back into a reasonable looking function. If not, no worries, it's still technically the same function so maybe I lose a few points here or there, better than nothing.
Oh and there was a bomb threat during that retake. I made sure to walk right next to the prof while the other 8 people writing with me held back and essentially cheated. I asked the prof why he was letting them do it and he said "Oh, I'm just going to deduct 15% from everyone's exam but yours".
Really dodged a bullet there, lol. Kinda miss university at times.
> by skipping class I didn't know the final was rescheduled!
Made a similar mistake. I showed up to an Astronomy final... 2 hours late by mistake! Prof hands me the test and says you have 20 mins to finish. Somehow I scored an A. Pure miracle.
I had an 8:30am materials course (semiconductor structures and such). Painful at the best of times, but the prof was... not a fantastic lecturer. Stopped going after the first or second class and just read the textbook. First midterm came around and it turned out I got the highest mark in the class, so the prof invited me to his office to get feedback, since I had obviously gotten so much out of the class. That was a bit awkward.
The last 8am class I had was something like economics, the professor had a strange pride in the fact that students were too tired to come to class and enjoyed marking them tardy and taking off points.
I had this too - one professor who taught the only two sections of a class required for the CS major. He always made them 8 am, and made a point about doing that. Walked in like clockwork on the dot every session and bellowed "Well good morning class! It sure is a beautiful morning, isn't it?"
I had an intro economics professor who was very similar. I think the class was at 8:30AM and the professor was very proud of the way he handled late homework assignments.
There was a box for homework at the front of the large lecture hall that 10 minutes after class began the professor would place the lid on the box and tape it shut. If your homework wasn't in it before then you got a 0 with no recourse.
Total nonsense, but it was a required class for engineers. I barely passed and did not give a fuck about that.
I had a required 7:30am class my freshman year. The professor started each class by rapping her ruler on the front table to startle everyone. Then, she individually called out people who nodded off. What a nightmare.
For a year I got up at 4:30am, rode a bike for 20mins, showered then spent 3-4 hours doing math proofs and watching lectures. The morning was the only time I could get this done since distractions are minimal, you don't have emails/phone calls/obligations to think about like you do after lunch when they start rolling in demanding your attention.
Funny, for me it's at night, for the same reasons you say. I'm a night owl, and I peak between midnight and 2 am
It has became really troublesome when I started working. If I was awake after midnight it became really hard to fall asleep. And I feel bad that I can't be at my top at my job because of the time difference.
Mine is similar, although extreme. I go to sleep at 6am, when the sun starts to rise. It's quite relaxing. I won't keep that schedule once I'm done with college, though.
I'm the same. Midnight to 2am is peak creativity for me. I just don't feel bad about not being at my top at my job, and can never make it into the office before 9.
Same here. It's not just work either, I always find music the most enjoyable at 1am and will often put off sleep to finish an album. I never feel like that at any other time of the day.
I absolutely know what its like. Thankfully my job now starts at 9, so I get a little extra time for sleep in the morning and I can stay up later without big consequences.
For me, ideally I would work from home until lunch, and then come into the office for the remainder of the work day. Not having to get up and get ready in the morning would push my schedule even further towards my comfort zone. Plus, my compiles are quite long (FPGA work) and I can easily shower, get ready, or cook breakfast after kicking something off. Someday!
It's always funny to me when people assume that sleep works the same for everyone or that it is as simple as scheduling something on a calendar. Neither are true.
I think most people can change their sleeping habits. If you actually practice good sleep hygene and make consistent habits around sleep and you still can't get to sleep at a reasonable time, then you are not the norm and may have a medical condition.
Well, I can say for myself that the younger me adapted faster to timezone changes than I do now. That adaptation is presumably driven by the diurnal rhythms of the destination, but given that a fair amount of modern life is conducted under artificial light (and artificial darkness, for those who sleep in), it seems plausible that sleep patterns could be modified to some extent, through adjustment to the already-artificial diurnal cycle.
If you're in your twenties, you've probably spent 8+ years building up a habit of sleeping late. It's expected that it would take you a reasonable amount of time to break that.
As an anecdote in the opposite way, I am a sort-of night owl (my peak hours are roughly 10:00pm to 1:30am). As a teenager I was a late night, late morning (4am to 2pm) sleeper. Around 17, I started training at 7am, meaning I had to be up at 5:45 every morning. When I eventually quit after about 4 years, it took me another 4 years to un-learn the habit and move back to being an evening person.
I don't mean to nitpick, but I don't think it takes very long to break a sleep habit. I travel quite a bit and so am not only changing my actual sleep hours significantly (i.e. going to bed at what used to be my 4pm or whatever) but also changing them based on local timezones (so this job requires me to go to bed 2am local time, vs another job where I can go to bed 10pm local time). Anyway point is I'm usually adjusted within a week.
And I certainly adjusted from my "classes start at 7am" in highschool schedule to my "classes start at 12pm" schedule in college near instantaneously.
Your personal anecdotes say nothing useful about the experiences of other people.
I get pretty wiped out for a week when the clocks go forward or back. I'm only marginally productive when the sun is up, but get a huge amount done from about 8pm to 2am.
But so what? That's me. I don't expect the rest of the world to be the same.
Sleep is clearly very individual. Standard school/office hours are a hugely inefficient waste of the potential of tens of millions of people.
It should be possible to design a more flexible system. But we still have ridiculous notions that early risers are somehow the model of virtue, and everyone else should aspire to the same hours.
I've always found the best way to deal with jet lag is just to stay up until it's a normal time to go to bed in one's current timezone. Depending on where you are going/arriving from this can be quite a long stretch, but it generally gets me set on the local timezone within about two days.
It helps that I'm not very good at sleeping on airplanes unless I've been awake for >30 hours
It also helps to pre-empt it a little. The last few times I've flown long-distance, I've tried to adjust my sleeping a day or two in advance of flying and had very little problems.
You are right to say that we should not jump to conclusions, but it is appropriate to ask to what extent the phenomenon is affected by culture - for one thing, that would raise the question of whether, and to what extent, students might modify their behavior in response, possibly nullifying the effect after a while.
The paper itself seems to consider the effect to be largely genetic in origin, which I assume is probably a well-supported conclusion from other studies.
People at different ages have a different circadian rhythm. For teens and people in their early twenties it's a later rhythm. You can modify it, but it works to varying degrees. There have been several studies that showed that high school for example should start later because of this. It's currently only ideal for teachers. Blaming this on a lack of sleep hygiene and discipline doesn't really address the problem.
I'm not looking to any reference but a search should be trivial.
It's hard to say, but what this definitely does not show is that "starting university classes at 11am or later would improve learning." Rather it shows that, on average students, who have classes at 8 or 9 are most alert and receptive to learning by 11.
Unless student habits have changed a lot since my time, many of them are stumbling out of bed at 7:45 to make that 8am class and haven't had anything to eat or drink yet. They consider themselves “evening people” rather than “morning people" because that's when the most interesting parts of their lives are happening.
A while back, I read an article that discussed the differences in people and how, during the hunter & gatherer era, some humans evolved to be night owls and some humans evolved to be early birds. It determined which person would keep watch at night.
In college, I remembered only signing up for 11am classes as a freshman before changing to 9am classes in sophomore and senior year. I think a lot of this has to do with staying up late in college.
There's probably a time where students can function properly, earlier than 11am, if they were to sleep by 12am.
If you could find that article, I'd be very interested in reading. I ask because I'm quite skeptical of the concept of humans "evolving" different time-preferences. Mostly because of 2 questions: "How was that selected for," and, "given that very little has changed about humans through evolution in the last 10,000 years, what sort of timeline did the article suggest this 'time-preference' evolution occured over?"
Boyd Eaton and his students did some of this work. Its touched on in The Paleolithic Prescription (popular book) with more details in papers before and since (search on book's authors' names for research papers. Sorry I don't have better for you now.) As I recall they identified three sleep patterns from anthropological studies of populations not influenced by modern technologies (eg. electric lighting) and from historical documents (ex. Victorian era doctors' notes mentioning what were considered normal sleep patterns at the time.)
1) Early to sleep + early to rise
2) Late to sleep + late to rise
3) Late to sleep + late to rise (with waking in the middle of the night)
A modern cartoon characterization of type three is Dagwood Bumstead from the comic strip Blondie. He would get up naturally for midnight snacks and over-sleep for work or snooze during work. Type three Victorians were noted by their physicials as naturally rising for midnight prayers or sex with spouses.
As to genetic selection, the postulated survival advantage relates to the military three watches of the night. With group members naturally awake throughout the night predators were better protected against, surprise attacks less likely, etc.. Hence, a mixed group consisting of all three types would have a survival advantage.
Having said that, from a genetic standpoint it's possible to have it so that just certain stable percentage of population has a given trait.
How can it be selected for - be eliminating whole villages/societies that have a wrong ratio.
Imagine you need 5% of population to be crazy risk takers with no survival instinct. Any more and a village collapses, but any less and you won't have anyone take certian risks when necessary.
Now, let's assume that the gene is encoded in mitochondrial dna (carried from mother to child, no influence from father). Also, nobody can really tell who has the gene uless a disaster strikes and such a gene is very helpful for survival or reproduction. So if a generation T has X% of this gene, T+1 will most likely have X% too.
Originally, nobody has the gene. So all the societies kind of manage to go by without it. Then one woman has it by random mutation. Her is now 1%, others are 0%.
But then a disaster strikes. And villages with 0% die off. 1% villages die off too, but not as much. After the disaster they are now the majority.
In one of the villages, a woman with the gene, by pure chance) had more children than usual. In that village the ratio is 5% now.
Disaster strikes again, and only villages with 5% are left.
Villages where the ratio increases above 5% through chance again, die because the chaos ensues. Villages with lover ratios are decimated once in a while.
One day people invent ways to protect themselves from the disaster, and ways to cope with above 5% ratio too. Then the gene will begin slowly drifting in one direction or another. But it will take generations for proportions to change significantly, and it's not certain if the geme will disappear or dominate the population ultimately.
I'm not syaing that this is the case with sleep, but that's the wyanit might work.
> I'm quite skeptical of the concept of humans "evolving" different time-preferences
As described in the wiki link above, the differences in "time-preference" are basically down to natural variance - I don't believe there's any evidence of a bi-modal distribution.
Nature does seem to select for anti-fragile populations (because by definition they are robust) and one way of achieving this is to have a certain amount of variability in phenotypes.
Or maybe... students would just stay up even later.
I know my own sleep basically drifts later and later until I run into hard deadlines. I'd be surprised if most people don't work that way, in a vacuum.
In my first two years, i didn't even try going to 8am classes after 1st week. And i know alot of engineering classmates who were like this. But i did end up going to 8am classes in my 4th year. Is it because you mature or because courses are actually related to you? I don't know.
While I was like this, some engineering classes scheduled quizzes in the morning. Skipping these were detrimental to my grades. With the benefit of hindsight, my behaviour of skipping morning classes was incredibly stupid, but at the time made perfect sense from my limited worldview.
I'm experiencing this right now. My first 3 semesters or so, classes before 10am were both difficult to go to and difficult to get anything out of. Yet without changing any of my habits, getting up earlier is far easier. I'd lean towards this being due to maturing, but it's naturally quite difficult to say when my sample size is myself.
It's not even an individual choice nor just "biology." When you have a dorm full of people making noise until 1 or 2 am. When you have all the social activity kicking off at 8 or 9 pm...
Unless your institution has a "quiet dorm" you can get a slot in, and you are sufficiently secure in your own, non-mainstream social status...
Yeah, exactly. It's all well and good for people to rant about Personal Responsibility and those dang coddled snowflakes, but how are you supposed to control everyone around you?
You could always transform your university into a miserable oppressive environment which no one really wants to go to, enforcing early quiet hours in every single dorm...or you could just push the class schedule ahead by a couple hours.
I have no evidence to rebut the conclusion—indeed it aligns with similar research on high school students.
However, a big chokepoint at my current school (major state university) is the availability of classrooms. Classes are already booked in the old (and recently expanded!) building and in the new graduate building for 12-plus hours each day.
There simply isn't enough space to put off scheduling courses until 11.
Besides, just because something is good for the average student doesn't mean it's good for all students. My classes certainly have a different flavor depending on whether they're in the early morning or late evening. Even if it's the same course, the differently timed sections have their own character and attract different sorts of students.
Then you are fooling yourself, caffeine doesn't really enhance mental performance. You just feel that you are more awake, but your brains aren't.
See e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20182035
> In conclusion, it appears that caffeine cannot be considered a 'pure' cognitive enhancer. Its indirect action on arousal, mood and concentration contributes in large part to its cognitive enhancing properties.
Indirect cognitive enhancement is good enough for me.
I've been sleeping bad the last couple days and I resorted to get an energydrink and coffee in the morning. The result was a sleepdrunk awake person, that barely functions. Pretty sure this sleep issue is because I take dinner too late in the evening (9-11pm)...
So what should be the idea here: brainless work in the morning and brain-intense work in the afternoon? Yup, sounds like the advice a lot of people use and give others.
What is frustrating is the article does not give that great information where I can just take a few of my own theories and test them through here.
I remember having a routine in high school where I would wake up at 5 am, do some language deciphering intense reading for half an hour, read through some interesting non-fictions for another half, get ready for school, and become sharper than anytime I have been before by 8o'clock.
Tbh, starting later would seem like a typical "doing things for the sake of doing things" thing to me. In my opinion, the majority of people who try to "fix" education are first and foremost just trying to leave a mark, letting everyone know that they were here (maybe without realizing it). Let's suppose you were given the chance to attend lectures by the most impressive person in the world. Don't you think that you'd soak it all in even when those talks were given at 6 am?
>Let's suppose you were given the chance to attend lectures by the most impressive person in the world. Don't you think that you'd soak it all in even when those talks were given at 6 am?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I physically wouldn't be able to. I'd try (most impressive in the world would require that I do my best), but at the end of the day circadian rhythms are really hard to tame.
I have a possibly dumb question. Wouldn't those students also be better off? They work the same number of hours, but later in the day. Unless it's the kind of thing that can't be one hour later?
The kinds of jobs available to typical high school students such as food service work and babysitting tend to start earlier in the day (in my experience). Food service jobs often start around 4:00 to beat the evening rush, and babysitting can start whenever the kids get out of school.
My view is that life rarely aligns to one's habits and/or inclination. This as as true in my teen years as it is in my fifth decade.
I won't project my experience on anyone else; I do however feel strongly that the learned ability to impose my sense of responsibility on my inclination has been a valuable skill in my life.
I remember one year when the math classes I needed were only held at 8am. Combined with roommates who regularly made loud noises as late as 4 in the morning, a lease I could not afford to break, and myself being a very light sleeper... it was a major detriment to my academics.
Why no discussion of the fact that people tend to wake up earlier as they age? A lot of professors are quite tired late in the day, and their lectures might not be too terrific. It seems we should multiply two functions, one increasing and the other decreasing, to find the best time. And then put all classes at that single best hour. Or, well, you know ... stick with the working hours that basically every other adult has to deal with.
MIT (in the 1980s) almost never had early morning classes. In fact, notoriously, Unified Engineering (aero-astro core sequence) started at 9AM; on the first day of class they apologized to us for the 9AM start saying that they just couldn't schedule it any other way (all the AF ROTC kids were already up so maybe this was a fig leaf excuse).
On the other hand I had more than one undergraduate class start in the early evening.
18 years old I had to be at work at 545am in the military to learn how to become an air traffic controller. I completed my training in 50% of the allotted time, becoming a fully certified air traffic controller in a fairly complex airspace - White Sand Missile Range, NM when F-117s were still in service. Maybe college students just need to have better self-accountability and learn responsibility.
Maybe college students just need to have better self-accountability and learn responsibility.
My ex husband was career military and used to say the same thing about our homeschooled sons -- that they needed to develop a routine and learn to just get up in the morning because someday a job would require this of them. Meanwhile, Mr. Hypocrite To The Max never stopped being a night owl himself and would stay awake on weekends until 2 a.m. or whatever and go to work on Monday morning on 2 or 3 hours of sleep, then nap when he got home after work because he was short of sleep. Twenty plus years of military service never really cured him of being a night owl.
It always amazes me how talented people are at ignoring actual reality for some convenient theory of theirs.
Right!? I mean, you have 18 year olds in 2 very different environments of the military and college. Like, in the military you have to also do incredibly complicated things under a lot of stress and it takes a lot of mental fortitude and training, and then you don't even know when that training will be tested unlike with a final exam. Passing classes is much simpler than landing a blackhawk into a firefight or the logistics of supplying a battleship, things 20 years olds do in the services. Yet the bar for entering college is generally much higher than for the military but the stress, responsibility, and workload of the average warfighter is much higher than for the average college student. I just don't get the real moaning and groaning and trying to make things trivially easy for the students (we all complain from time to time to get things off our chests, I get that though)
> I just don't get the real moaning and groaning and trying to make things trivially easy for the students
If colleges treated students with military expectations, they'd stop getting as many applications. The school would paradoxically become less completive over time.
It's why colleges are putting in luxury student dorms and spending millions on activity budgets. The pampering of the American college student is a direct result of universities turning into degree businesses, instead of the halls of mutual development they used to be. Growth and development require sacrifice, paying for a slightly higher number on a transcript does not.
It is not, because to completely failed out of training there have to documented examples of why that individual can't perform the job. We make every accommodation to see if they can perform. However, the job requires you being able to work at any hour, thus they aren't able to perform the duties of the job.
It sounds like you're arguing for the title here. You say the job requires you to work at any hour, among other things. You say the lessons are at 6 in the morning. You say 80% fail. Sure, it doesn't conclusively prove that people drop out because of those two things, but it seems likely.
"However, the job requires you being able to work at any hour, thus they aren't able to perform the duties of the job."
That is why it is survivorship bias. You are assuming that it is possible for everyone because you and your coworkers were able to do it, while ignoring the fact that many people flunked out because they couldn't do it. That is what survivorship bias is.
Survivorship bias is when the people who survive don't understand why other people failed. We understand why they failed and the most common reason is that most people aren't comfortable making quick decisions where people's lives are at stack. Time of day usually isn't a factor here, but people's confidence in themselves to trust their training and decisions. The other reason is people just can't handle the shear amount of knowledge (rules) required to perform the job. Such as not everyone can become a surgeon due to the education, skill-set and intelligence required not every person can due air traffic control.
As you said earlier, some people drop out because they can't work at all hours. You don't know why, but you are assuming that it is because they don't work as hard as you . Hence survivorship bias. People who drop out for reasons other than not being able to work effectively at all hours are irrelevant.
The only way you can 'drop-out' per-se is if you diagnose yourself with 'fear of controlling'. Meaning the job scares you, outside of that you cannot just quit.
Things are never so simple and clear cut -- delayed sleep phase disorder is a fairly common ailment. There was a recent paper which studied a mutation that might explain some cases of DSPD [1]. According to [1], a sizeable fraction of the population possesses a mutation such that their circadian clock runs ~2 hours slower (their day is longer) and so have a sleeping pattern which drifts. This usually manifests itself as late sleep/late starts.
Do you want someone controlling your plane who can't handle waking up early? Air traffic control is 24 hours a day 7 days week; you will be working at all hours of the day.
>Do you want someone controlling your plane who can't handle waking up early?
I would rather have someone who has no problem staying up late rather than someone who is a 'morning person'. Once awake, night owls seems to be better at staying awake.
Around the time I turned fourteen I lost my ability to fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning. I hung on to decent grades by "testing well," but never able to keep my head up during morning classes. All along people told me it was a discipline problem, and I followed their goddamned advice and got nowhere.
The last fifteen years of research in sleep and brain chemistry have validated my experience. It had nothing to do with self-accountability and responsibility; some people are night owls, others are not.
Fuck you for thinking that your personal experiences are indicative of me having “poor character.” Fuck you and your fucking career.
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News no matter how wrong another person is.
We all know how activating it can be when someone treads callously into a painful area. But you need to let that surge pass before replying. Failing that, re-read your comment and edit out any uncivil bits after you post. In this case, deleting the first and last paragraphs would have made for a fine comment and a more effective rebuttal.
I mean dude, he's not talking to people with medical issues. I don't think anyone would besmirch you due to a medical condition. I think he's talking about people without sleeping conditions, just Gaussian distributed recruits that want to get in. The services will ask and test you on these clear issues like people that can't drink a gallon of water in under a minute or folks blind in one eye. Also, being a night owl is not a medical condition, what your brief comment describes is obviously a medical condition that would disqualify your from the services. You life is not in anyway easy because of it, as far as I can tell from this comment. It's not a big deal. However, if what the researchers say is true about the widespread 'night owl' prevalence in the population, then it is obviously not something that can't be corrected with a very loud and buff drill sergeant, as many many cohorts of incoming boot camps across the world for centuries have shown.
I went through basic training in open-floor barracks with a few folk who insisted they were 'night owls' and would play their music to 01:00 or later, falling asleep to the noise.
Initially the rest of us endured it and would turn-off the radio when they fell asleep, to then enjoy four hours sleep. After the second week, however, we managed to 'cure' the night owls.
I am sure many people suffer a medical condition that impairs sleeping. Most, however, do not.
Maybe you should think about it less as "coddling" and more as "people are different and stuffing them into the same box is runs the very real risk of failure or unhappiness." But that doesn't validate your own life choices the way your posts do, so I can understand why you might not.
The idea that "everyday life" should demand that everyone operate in cognitively subpar conditions for them because you like them is a silly one. The last time I woke up before 9AM when I didn't have a flight to catch the next morning was 2013; I will have been successfully running my own consultancy (and making half again as much money with about half the work that the "everyday life" equation specified) for three years now at the end of this month.
Weird how that life works and works well without sneering at people who do like to get up and work early.
You sound like every single martial artist that I've ever met, and almost every single one of them has - just like you - an overblown sense of how tough and knowledgeable they are, and how everyone around them is a pathetic worm who just needs to harden up and get to work.
Funny thing is getting up early to go to the gym or do some course work isn't tough, almost everybody who goes to college does that. Long days? College. (17 hour days for weeks on end through every semester for me.) You get weekends, college students don't. You get paid for your hours, college students need to work a job outside of their full time (40+ hour) studies.
At least in New Zealand, universities structure their courses so that only the top percentage of the population can get through the stress and workload - something like an 80-90% dropout rate by the end of the bachelor's degree. (Weren't you bragging about an 80% dropout rate in your course?)
What is tough is successfully completing something that medical professionals tell you that you very likely can't do, whether it's a college degree in an "inappropriate" field or learning to walk again.
Put this another way, if you know you can do something, is completion of it worthy of note?
Yeah, gatekeeping and all that jazz, I agree there, but I'm going to go ahead and say that the average US college freshman student probably does not have it as 'tough' as the average US boot-camp inductee. I would extend that to the integral of 'toughness' over the tenure of the average US college 4th year student versus the average 4th year US service member, but it's more of a crap-shot with the Air Force ;).
The average 4th year US service member will probably have put up with massively more crap than the average college graduate. Which makes them tough in a specific way. That seems plausible enough :)
What I was objecting to
A) "Life is tough/ college isn't".
Put in those terms, "Life is tough, X isn't" works for basically anything. And, I would argue, military service is closer to college (specific schedules, insulated from real world, the amount of time spent on PS/XBOX) than real life.
B) the tone that seems to indicate that the military has a monopoly in all types of toughness.
What kind of university has the space to start classes at 11AM? Just the logistics of trying to fit that many more classes into your limited building space seems impossible. You'd either need a lot more buildings, or you'd need to be forcing other things to the early time slot.
At my university the last undergraduate classes were out by 5, but graduate classes would run as late as 9pm. I think a perception that undergraduate should be 8-5 is part of the problem.
My advisor told me that many of the prerequisites for engineering were deliberately set at 8AM as a way to weed out the less dedicated students. Don't know how much truth there is to that statement, but I do know I missed a lot of physics lectures freshman year for this reason.
If you actually started the university day at 12pm, though, then evening classes would run later, and students would stay up later, creating a vicious cycle.
Plus, you'd have fewer daylight hours to walk home after class.
I really don't understand the dependency on hours of the clock.
Would a student struggling in an 8am class in Pacific time suddenly excel if they moved to the East coast and went to 11am classes starting at the same moment?
Is there any variation between the east and west extremes of a given time zone?
Is 11am post daylight savings as effective as 11am before shifting the clocks?
Or is this more about the social habits of the people around the students than the height of the sun in the sky?
For healthy normal people, when you travel your circadian rhythms reset your body's internal clock and sleeping schedule based mostly on sunlight exposure. It takes between a few days and a week to adjust (this is exactly jet lag).
There is absolutely variation between time zones extremes. The Spanish, for instance, notoriously eat and stay up "late" compared to the Polish or Germans. All three countries are in the same time zone, despite the sun setting about 2 hours later in Spain.
Social habits do matter (the Spanish schedule is somewhat more delayed than the 2 hours you might expect from sunlight alone).
If you'd like to look up more on this topic, you can read about light therapy, sleep hygiene, shift worker syndrome (where normal people try to sleep later than natural), and delayed sleep phase syndrome (where night owls try to sleep earlier than natural).
I hate classes that start late. It just means I'll sleep till the time I need to leave for class. If the class is at 8, I'll get up at 730 and of the class is at 11, I'll wake up at 1030. So a later class just wastes my morning.
Honest question, did you read the article? While I haven't read this particular one, I'm familiar enough with the field to know that controlling for confounding factors is one of the most basic types of controls. Any half-decent article would control for the kind of thing you're suggesting.
That said, the article appears to have been published by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, which does have a less than stellar reputation for rigorous peer-review and, as a result, article quality[0].
I know this has been proven for high school students as well. There have been some interesting studies about starting times and standardized testing as well. Check out the study
"Examining the Impact of Later High School Start Times on the Health and Academic Performance of High School Students: A Multi-Site Study"
AFAIK the early hours classes are meant to build discipline, not to optimise for learning. A lot of school rituals seem to be built with the goal of making you used to a disciplined punctual life, rather than actually teaching you any knowledge.
My experience (as someone who was elected to public education administration) suggests it's often more about logistics. For example, adjusting how many bus drivers (and busses) are needed in a district to serve elementary, middle and high schools. Staggering start times reduces the need, but drives one of these options to be earlier than the others.
High school sports complicates logistics later in the day.
It's not just a question of learning; it's also a question of cost and resources.
I understand completely that exhausted students are going to perform worse than if they were better-rested. I absolutely do, as I was one - a more naturally late-night person who had to make it to those 9am classes and exams.
But look at the opening photo folks.
We're being asked to give the younger generation later start times because they're going to stay out partying no matter what during school, and we better compensate for this.
What a pathetic state of affairs. Higher education is not meant to be 4 years of partying. Or if it is, let me know which schools are selling this vision, so as an employer I can more carefully filter people's 'educational' experience.
The opening photo looks to be at a sporting event, during the day. Not sure how that is problematic.
A systemic change of college and young adult culture would be required to stop students from partying late at night, I don't think the colleges selling or not selling this vision is going to have much of an impact.
I am not sure why pushing back some starting times is such a terrible idea given what we know about college students habits.
It kind of reminds me about addicts and either attempting to punitively discourage them and deal with the consequences or give them clean needles and at least ameliorate some of the problems associated with usage.
After the first test was failed for not showing my work I dropped the class. My grades in every other class went up after that (next class was closer to 11am) and I never took another 8am class during college.