School starting times are one of the worst things for night owls and I hope ongoing research helps to raise awareness and bring change so night owl kids don't needlessly have to suffer for 10+ years.
I long thought having different school starting/ending times is the way to go. Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11.
Standing up at 8 is hard for me and I'm happy to be in a job where I can start working at 10, but here in Bavaria school starts at 08:15 and I had to set my alarm to 06:30 for a huge part of my life even tho I rarely fell asleep before 00:30,sometimes much later. The result was that I regularly missed a day of school, because I was just too tired to go. Luckily my parents were supportive.
Also my performance on the 8am classes was much worse than on later classes. In university I skipped all 8am lectures and even skipped early exams and waited for a "better scheduled" exam.
The worst part about it was how non-understanding all the early-birds are. They just didn't grasp that asking me to be awake and productive at 8am was like asking them to do work after 11pm and that "just go to bed earlier" isn't a working solution. Just ignorance of a different rythm.
I strongly believe this has heavily affected my education.
For half of secondary and whole high school I had to wake up at 6 to bus around 80 minutes to school (usually starting at 8:30). I barely kept awake during these early hours, I was also severely sleep-deprived and low on energy all that time. My grades were also sub-par. I had no motivation to pick up anything after school; even gave up on programming (which I started around 8 y.o.)
Then I went to university and moved closer to the city centre. The lectures usually started at 9 or later. The quality of my sleep and live in general increased enormously. I was staying up later then before, yet I had more energy. Even managed to pick up new hobbies and come back to my tinkering with programming which lead to the start of my current career.
What I'd do is just show up late to high school each day, walk into the vice principal's office and plead nolo contendere, and get a detention. Then by the end of the week I'd have enough detentions to roll them into a single saturday detention, so I'd show up to school then and bring my laptop and code which looked like work so they'd let me do it. Then I got a job at Google where they'd let me show up late and I'd talk in the cafeteria about all the coding I did while in saturday detention and people would be like, oh holy crap that was you?!
Ah, yeah this is what I should have done, but every adult I had around me treated detention like it was some kind of black mark.
Then again, I don't think laptops were normalized enough, and would probably have been banned during Saturday detention.
It's wonderful how you were able to use a system stacked against you for your own benefit, this is the kind of world I wish we could provide for everyone...
It's funny that I'm less tired and have more energy as an adult than I did as a child (isn't it supposed to be the other way around?) It's pretty rare that I show up to work in a tired state, but it was a daily occurrence at school.
Kids and teens need a lot more sleep, perhaps 2+ hours more than adults. I recall many slow mornings being harassed by my mom to get up already, it's time to go. Without a helpful mother, oof, I would have missed a lot more days of school.
My high school in Argentina had a night shift for the students in the last two years due to space constraints in the building. I’d go in at 5-6PM and leave at 22:30. The best two years of my time in school. The amount of effort I had to put in vs the amount I absorbed dropped drastically. And driving against traffic (against the people leaving the city), enjoying the lower temperatures in warm months, having lunch and dinner at home, not having to miss school to go to a doctor or a store that runs 9-5. Everything just makes sense to me.
The pandemic has been fantastic for me. I don’t have to show up for work until morning Zoom standup at 10:30. I’m really not looking forward to having to wake up early when this is all over.
Yeah, in secondary (high) school it was not uncommon for me to basically nap the first class or two. Luckily I got pretty good grades and was capable of self study to keep ahead of the content and no subject was consistently a morning class, so I had no worse consequences than a teacher asking my parents if I was doing OK at home.
I currently start my working day at 10, but I'd prefer it a bit later. I notice I start getting really productive around 16-17 - when all the early birds stop working (which also means less interruptions and meetings)
My natural sleeping rhythm always seem to drift towards 3-4 -> 12 in weekends or when I take a few days off.
I mentioned 10 or 11, because I believe a shift of a couple of hours (by 1 or 2 classes) already brings a tremendous benefit for many students, while having only a small impact on the schools organization and other social activites of students (like late afternoon club activities). So while not ideal, I think the change is actually easily implementable without too many negative consequences.
Personally, I would be even more productive in an afternoon only school. I did work for a while from 1pm to 8pm and I really enjoyed how rested I was, but this schedule definitely limits available club activites.
My sophomore year in college all of my classes started after noon. It was by far the best I ever remember feeling in my entire life because of how well rested I was.
I like this idea, and I think the research has backed it for decades - I wrote a letter to my Senator, Hillary Clinton, in support of later school starts back in middle school that cited such work. I think it hasn't happened for two reasons:
1. School is childcare for a lot of people; secondary schools let out early so older siblings can take care of younger ones.
2. As COVID has shown - it's difficult to manage multiple hybrid schedules and cohorts in an equitable way, especially if you're not expanding the number of teachers (which most districts can't due to budget constraints)
This is a little US-centric, but I suspect it applies broadly to the rest of the West at least.
My school had a morning and afternoon shift (I think this is common in my country). You would get assigned to the A or B shift and rotate weekly, so one week I would go to school in the morning at 8am and the next one in the afternoon at 2pm. Even though it was harder to wake up for the 8am classes, I think it was better than staying until 7pm in school when it's already dark and there is no day left for play. It was torture waking up early, esp. in the cold winters, but having to walk (often run) 2 or 3 km to school to come just in time would stimulate the wake-up.
Where I grew up (Bulgaria) a lot of schools have 1 term starting in the afternoon until evening and 1 early in the morning so everyone can be screwed over to some extent but not the whole time.
All my standardized testing options (SAT/ACT) were early in the morning because of the myth that this is peak performance time. My personal peak energy is around 1-2pm.
I don't think this is it. You can shift your sleep schedule by several hours and have it still be "natural" if you choose to. I'm not talking about massive 12-hour changes or anything, but in college I would routinely sleep from about 2am-10am if left to my own devices. That's what felt best for me at the time, and it continued for a year or two after. The problem was that I was always tired because I would have to wake up around 7 for work, then I would get a "second wind" around 9pm and not be able to sleep until 1 or 2.
After a few week of forcing myself to go to bed earlier, even if it meant staring at the ceiling, it went away and getting up early was not an issue anymore. It also got easier as I got older, and there is some evidence that some people's circadian rhythms will shift earlier as they age but over the course of decades, not months or even a few years.
If you're physically unable to shift your sleep schedule even a couple hours, you have a sleep disorder and should see a physician. 8 or 9am is not all that early.
This is the kind of anecdotal response I was referring to with my statement. While I agree that you can shift your rhythm by a couple of hours, that does not mean standing up at 6:30 will ever be natural for me.
Against your anecdote, I present myself starring at the ceiling (which is torture for me, I can not shut off my brain, ever.) for many many school years to no effect. I did try many things, because it's certainly not fun to feel tired all the time. But if left to my own devices I get into a 3am-11am rhythm and have worked like this in my adulthood for multiple years.
I can rather easily shift by 2 hours to a 1am to 9am rhythm without much impact, I do feel the impact (tiredness, hard to fall asleep) of a 3 hour shift from midnight to 8am and I'm absolutly unable to go to bed at 10:30 so I can be rested at 6:30. Even if I manage to fall asleep that soon (e.g. from physical exhaustion), I will not be rested at all when standing up at 6:30.
Interesting enough, I can also shift my rhythm by a similar amount in the other direction. A lot of my social life happens online and when I was spending 6 months in a timezone 7 hours shifted from my local friends, I could shift my rhythm to go to bed between 5 and 6am so I have more overlapping online-time with them, but I couldn't shift it further.
So, how is your response not ignorance of a different rhythm?
Same from my experience, except staring at the ceiling had effect -- it made harder for me to fall asleep and instead of getting to bed at 3-4am and falling asleep almost instantly, I got to bed at 1-2am and fallen asleep after 5-7am.
Tried it multiple times for week-two. Never again I will do this mistake.
I long thought having different school starting/ending times is the way to go. Like one cohort starting at 8 and another starting at 10 or even 11. Standing up at 8 is hard for me and I'm happy to be in a job where I can start working at 10, but here in Bavaria school starts at 08:15 and I had to set my alarm to 06:30 for a huge part of my life even tho I rarely fell asleep before 00:30,sometimes much later. The result was that I regularly missed a day of school, because I was just too tired to go. Luckily my parents were supportive.
Also my performance on the 8am classes was much worse than on later classes. In university I skipped all 8am lectures and even skipped early exams and waited for a "better scheduled" exam.
The worst part about it was how non-understanding all the early-birds are. They just didn't grasp that asking me to be awake and productive at 8am was like asking them to do work after 11pm and that "just go to bed earlier" isn't a working solution. Just ignorance of a different rythm.