Is School Slowly Destroying Your Brain? | AsapSCIENCE | History Teacher Reacts

[@MrTerry]

Taking into account all factors, what would be ideal school start times?

[@jeffslote9671]

About 10 am.

[@joshuatempleton9556]

8 am as it is now, that way kids are home for meals, chores and other things, teachers can do what they need to do etc more activity is done in the afternoon than it is in the morning. ntm that most jobs start at 8 or 9 am so that gives parents time to get kids off to school ect.

[@GeckoTalks]

Around 8:30 a.m.

[@Boodieman72]

9am start and end at 3pm

[@LJ-pi6np]

Not before 9. I Wonder if Mr Terry"s idea of HS vocational schools could help make school-work schedules more flexible.

[@nonamenoname9352]

The absolute worst part of high school was getting up at 6:30 for me, I slept on the bus every day. Once I went to college and I did not have to get up until 9:00 and it made everything sooo much easier.

[@himarei]

We should get rid of homework as well. I had 4 to 6 hours of homework everyday. With house chores, night routine and homework, I rarely had time to hang out with my friends. All day at school (from 7am to 4:30pm) I needed to be on the lookout for bullies, after school it's homework and study until 9 to 10 pm. 15 hours of work per day for a child is ridiculous.

[@SgtRocko]

Our Soviet school system wasn't all that great - BUT... it was actually MORE flexible than the US system is (I know, right?). We started Sept 1 and finished May 31; classes were Monday through Saturday, and started at 8:30am and ran 'til 1:30pm. Saturday was usually when we had physical education, Labour (basically Shop Class for boys and HomEc for girls), and Military Preparation training, so we actually liked going on Saturdays. ANYHOW... my region was not Russian speaking, so if you wanted to improve your Russian to get ahead later, there were afternoon classes in the language. There were also usually extra Maths, Sciences, etc. - since most kids didn't go on to university, they could leave school at 1:30pm and go help with the family shopping. Kids attempting to get into university would take the afternoon classes (you could go 'til 4:30, depending on what classes you wanted to take). I personally think that the US should look into something like that - for people who are NOT mathematically/scientifically inclined, you're not forced into studying the stuff you'll only use in college (hush, I have NEVER used advanced maths since leaving school LOL) and since the kids CHOOSE any extra classes, it gets them more invested. Just a thought.

[@heroslippy6666]

I definitely think there is value in considering what kids are actually getting from school. If a group is blatantly ignoring class time do they really need to be there? Forcing kids to be in classes they don't like causes problems, even shop class and robotics still had people who didn't want to be there either. It just stresses the teachers out and wastes time. The physics teacher at my highschool was one of the only that I've ever seen get sparks of engagement from students that didn't care. He didn't always engage with strictly school topics. He would even discuss with people that wanted to become youtubers or streamers. Once he finished the required lectures he made the time valuable. (and don't ever ask a dumb science question in front of him, that was a trap many walked into. lol)

[@blazergamer6425]

Honestly I have personally talked about this subject with other people and have said something similar to what your schooling system was without even realizing it lol

[@genovayork2468]

From where are you?

[@panther6x]

I think the system has it backwards. Most small kids are better at getting up early, and atleast in my story, parents had to take their kids to elementsry and middle. I think highschool should start later as most teens stay up later and get up later.

[@jinyoungmysteria193]

I had a psychology teacher in high school who was against the school changing their time 7:30am-2:30pm to 8:30am-3:30pm. Teacher said that it'll just enable students to stay up late even more because of the one hour shift lmao. I found that ridiculous, especially from a psychology teacher. That time change was implemented when I was a senior, and it was the best thing that ever happened. I was less drowsy at school and I felt more energized. My friends and I never "stayed up later" as my psychology teacher claimed

[@joshbull623]

​@@jinyoungmysteria193Your teacher siad that because of kids like me. Already was staying up late watching adult swim cartoons and playing video games until 3am and missing the bus hoping my parents would drive me late on their way to work so I didn't have to walk, an hour shift either wouldn't have been noticed at all or would have meant I kept playing until 4am instead 😅. Don't even get me started if my friends were over too, no shot this would have worked at my school. 😂

[@Herr_Damit]

@@joshbull623 You sound like an insufferable child. Missing the bus so your parents would drive you? Were you neglected so much, that this was your way of crying for attention?

[@genovayork2468]

If your parents took you to school in primary school and fricking middle school you the biggest loser I know.

[@beccangavin]

8:28 I used to read books in the middle of the night when I was a child. I would arrange for the hallway light to shine in just such a way that I could use it to illuminate the pages. I would go to bed early but I wasn’t tired so it didn’t matter. Then I was super tired in school.

[@cs82271]

As an adult looking back, it's insane that I had to catch the bus at 6:15am as a middle schooler. Then in high school, which started at 7:15am, I was expected to complete the heavier workload while working until 10/11pm

[@Nezzeraj]

One of the biggest reasons not mentioned for the early start times is for working parents. Because of the common 9-5 jobs, parents need to get their kids ready for school, and often take them to school, before work begins.

[@KidarWolf]

Maybe a solution for this is keeping the start times the same, but having the mornings in school providing cots for students to sleep on after taking roll call, then have actual teaching start later? It means teachers have to supervise their students sleeping, but that gives them time to work quietly on grading homework that's been handed in, and handle admin tasks. Then, maybe wake students, and give a short calisthenics or yoga workout, followed by a short interlude for a simple breakfast of things like cereal bars and fruit juice before starting class. Alternatively, I know some Japanese businesses have nap time for their workers, and I think maybe that's something we could integrate into schools? Have students work in class for a couple of hours, then have lunch, then a one hour nap period, then continue schooling after that, and finish school an hour later than they do currently?

[@aaronunterseher1627]

Things that made school hard for me (32) Fluorescent lights (horrible migraine and the sensation to sleep the hole time) Un dignosed astigmatism Horrible sleep. i agree with this If i could sleep till 10 and go to sleep at 2 am i would have been great... To many topics at 1 time, having 6 periods and 5 of which had homework on completely different things got overwhelming quickly... If a teacher would focus on teaching more than 1 way and getting rid of sally with apple snd oranges questions Visual, verbal, and hands-on... For example, if my math teacher showed me how to set up a length of drain pipe to teach slope, i probably would have learned it better... If my teacher gave me copy easel and told me to play around in this glorified paint software and gave me an assignment to meassure and draw a thing to fit in a thing i probably would have learn geometry, fractions, and decimals better... I got you test questions... When teachers would write a test question like, Mustache man began his military campaigns in 1939. In what year was mustache man born...

[@KidarWolf]

I feel you on the fluorescent lights and migraines thing, they're a trigger for me too. I've also been diagnosed with autism and ADHD as an adult, so no wonder school was a bad fit for me - the world just isn't designed for my neurotype at all. Likewise, astigmatism - undiagnosed until I was an adult. That said, my astigmatism is quite mild, so it wasn't too much of a problem in a classroom, provided any text on the board was large enough. The Sally with apples and oranges questions are especially fiendish for neurodivergent folk, as our understanding of how language works is rather different than for neurotypical folk. I've likened it to having to work in a foreign language all the time. Often times, what someone neurotypical thinks a sentence means and what a neurodivergent person thinks a sentence means are quite different, and it comes down to the nuances of specific word choice and sequence. Some of the logical fallacies in those questions are quite puzzling, as the correct answer is more often "not enough data provided", rather than the answer that is being sort of fished for. As an example: "All students are given two apples. If Tom has four apples, Sally has two apples, and Jim has no apples, who took Jim's apples?" The answer they're looking for is that Tom did it - but there's actually not enough data to satisfy a criminal court on that - we don't know whether Jim gave his apples to Tom, or whether Sally took Jim's apples and gave them to Tom, or whether Tom took an apple from both Sally and Jim, and Jim gave his remaining apple to Sally. Any conclusion that can be drawn from the available data is pure conjecture, unless the conclusion is "Tom has four apples, Sally has two apples, Jim has no apples." For teaching styles - absolutely! I was very lucky to have teachers who were very aware of different learning styles, so we tended to have classes structured so that we did reading/audible instruction, then visual demonstration, then hands-on learning in order to cover a topic. This got interesting with subjects like biology, as it meant we did diagram/paper dissection in one lesson, then in our next lesson in that class we'd have a choice of doing real dissection, or going to the library to do more reading on it, for those of us that were squeamish or who were made ill by the smell of formaldehyde. On the test question thing, the best guess I can give is 1898, since mustache man was old enough to fight in WW1. (A quick google search shows he was a year younger than my guess.) I don't really think the exact year of someone's birth is particularly relevant to learning history - I think as long as you can understand the rough decade, that's close enough to understand what influences and experiences they had in their upbringing that may have led them to think a particular way.

[@sephrot6830]

in a world where everyone sleeps later than they should because of technology school probably should start later. You cant just say to sleep earlier especially when so many things enable a kid to stay up later

[@Batmans_Pet_Goldfish]

Like parents.

[@sephrot6830]

@@Batmans_Pet_Goldfish I mean back in 200 or even 100 years ago people fell asleep when it was dark because theres just no light. Most people didnt even stay up past 9 let alone even later than that. Even for most “good” parents they allow a teenager stay up till 11 this generation

[@krummhorn2824]

Not to mention, if students aren’t dismissed until late afternoon, they will be traveling home in the dark. That can’t be good either.

[@mutecryptid]

School gave me chronic pain, mental illness and insomnia 💀

[@josiaho5927]

Remove daylight savings while we’re changing things because that’s a whole new level of unnecessary messed up sleep schedules.

[@KidarWolf]

Studies in the UK actually found that daylight savings drastically reduced child-involved road traffic accidents/pedestrian collisions, so there's actually a strong argument for keeping it. That said, I think maybe the optimal solution is instead of doing it in a single jump, if it was done in two phases, 3 months apart, shifting time by half an hour each time, instead of a full hour. That half an hour isn't as big a gap to bridge as a full hour, so may disrupt sleep less.

[@pgplaysvidya]

my HS started at 830. there are schools that start earlier?? that's inhumane

[@Shythalia]

Yeah, both in elementary & high schools, we had to be there before 7:15am because that's when the flag ceremony starts. Actual classes start at 7:30am. AND THEN, the high school I went to changed the time to 7 AM because they HATED how much of us keep arriving late to school. AND THAT'S SUPPOSED TO MOTIVATE US FROM NOT BEING LATE?????? They already punish us by missing more of our first class of the day by making us clean around the school, now they're just adding more victims to this horrid act. No wonder I'm so depressed & anxious now! I've been sleep-deprived since I was 13!!!

[@deborahkilmer9271]

I have thought that if we have to keep the start times as they are, it might be a good idea to set the schedules so that core subjects like math and literature would be taught in the afternoon, and the early hours be devoted to gym and study halls.

[@octapusxft]

The entire school system has to get overhauled. We should not be trained to be glorified short term storage data banks for information that can be found with a quick search online. We should be getting trained to judge and filter information so that we can tell when someone is misinforming.

[@PhrontDoor]

The reason older-kid schools start so early is the logistics of buses. There are not enough buses to have one per route per school, generally. So the systems have to do one route on shift A for high school, then shift B for junior-high, then shift C for elementary... so the last run of the buses are getting the youngest kids.

[@michaelfrye9864]

When I was a kid I was always a night owl, and was told over and over again that it was just me being lazy… I’ve been out of school for 15 years and I work construction. During the summer it’s second/night shift so a start time that can very anywhere from 4pm to 8pm till when ever we get done.. During the winter when it gets too cold and I go back to days I’m miserable

[@severdislike4222]

Depends on age range honestly. Teenagers - Yeah, brain.ini doesn't boot before 10:00 a.m. at a minimum.

[@TheHorzabora]

Speaking as a night owl, who finds consistent 9am starts impossible without literally sleeping outdoors/in a tent (at which point I become sunlight powered) I so agree with this. Also, frankly, as someone who had to walk to school on a rural road without a pavement/sidewalk - it’s dangerous in winter in northern latitudes, too! Edit: 80% of US schools start before 8.15AM? That’s inhuman. We ‘started’ at 8.45, with first classes at 9.00, so a ‘working’ start time. Of course, teachers started earlier and finished later. You couldn’t pay me to do that job.

[@Herr_Damit]

I can vividly remember staying up until "ghost hour" (12h pm. or am? the one in the middle of the night) when I was in elementary school, playing with my Gameboy in the moonlight that fell through the window. Insomnia got worse the older I got, from school-year 10 on, I regularly just lay awake the whole night, not playing games, just trying to sleep. Now I am almost 31 and I have severe depression. Sleep is so important. I wouldn't say that screen-time is decisive at all , in my experience, it really doesn't matter. It's even better to get up again and do something that takes energy, playing video games is far better than laying awake for hours.

[@Katie-mb8zj]

Another issue that I don’t see being brought up with doing any form of staggered start times is day care for younger siblings/cousins. I remember as early as upper elementary school having friends who had to watch their younger siblings from the time school got out until a parent/guardian/responsible adult was able to make it home from work. It saved a lot of families money as day care in the US can be so expensive that one parent’s paycheck may be just enough to cover that one bill every month.

[@j.rinker4609]

I went from being an adjunct at a local community college, where I could get up at 4, walk 5 miles, go to work, and be home in time to nap, to teaching elementary (k-5) art classes. Our district has a 4 day week (Monday through Thursday). I would have to get up at 3:30 to get to work by 7:30 IF I wanted to walk. So instead I get up at 5, and can MAYBE walk 1 mile. I'm there until 4:30 with bus duty, sometimes until 6:00 with meetings, and until 7 today through Thursday this week with conferences. It's TOO long of day for students AND teachers. There's no time or energy left to exercise or cook dinner. A 4 day week is terrible for vulnerable students who count on school breakfast and lunch, and those with interventions who have trouble with routine changes. I liked 8:30 or so until 3:00 for a 5-day week MUCH better (what we had in elementary). I took an OPTIONAL zero hour class in high school (7:45 to 8:45???). If you took zero hour, you COULD take early release (get done around 2 instead of 3), which I didn't. So I wouldn't mind a high school day of quarter to 9 or 10 to 9 until 3, or quarter to 8 to 2 for those students who CHOSE that.

[@Riiseli]

In the US my school started at 7.45, which felt insane given my high school in Finland had started at 8.30. Generally young children can start earlier. Now after school care might be an issue. In Finland by third grade kids commute by themselves (many start at age 6-7) and come to home prior to their parents as the school days are about four hours (4*45 plus lunch and recess between each class) at the start, so they day is often done just after noon.

[@RedScareClair]

It's actually amazing how many of our societal issues would be lessened by prioritizing walkable cities. If all non - rural kids could walk, take a city bus, or a light rail to school, this eliminates the need for a school bus program for the vast majority of kids. This is literally how I grew up in Hudson County, NJ. Friends walked to school together. For younger kids, parents could walk them to school before heading to work themselves. There was no school bus service or waiting 45 minutes in a line of cars to drop and pickup kids. And as a result, I never had to be at school at some freakishly early time. The weird thing to me is when I tell people this where I live now it's so foreign to them their eyes glaze over.

[@FinalGaiden]

Maybe I'm just the exception but I'd have to be forced to go to sleep at 9PM as a teen and get up at 6AM. The reasoning is because my father had to get up early to go to work and didn't want any noise. Sleeping didn't seem to negatively affect me since i was getting enough of it. What was draining for me was the fact that i would have spend 3 hours each school day on the bus and so I'd usually just play video games or listen to music to pass the time and de-stress myself. Since our house was the furthest from the school, i would be one of the last getting dropped off and the first getting picked up.

[@crosshyparu]

I’ve heard theories of having shorter school days with school being year round. So school would be say September to July 5 days a week and somewhere around 4 hours a day.

[@KidarWolf]

This was really interesting - as a natural night owl to begin with, my peak wakefulness period as an adult is around 10pm, and lasts probably two hours. As a teenager, that was pushed back a lot further, with my peak wakefulness not coming until about 2am, so for me, school was an absolute disaster - though I'm also a natural short sleeper, 5 hours is about all I've needed ever since I was a teenager, but it did mean I routinely had to function on only three hours of sleep to go to school, which is nowhere near enough for me, even as a short sleeper. It was sustainable for short stretches of one to two days, but after three days, I noticed I would fall asleep in class, and wasn't functioning at my best. Perhaps of interest, I read from some ADHD folks (I'm autistic and have ADHD, so I like to check in with my neurotypes and see how everyone manages to navigate the world that isn't really designed with them in mind), that sleep hygiene techniques are actually worse. Some of us actually fall asleep faster by having audio-visual stuff on a screen beside the bed than if we try to make the room totally dark and quiet. The running theory at the moment is it might be to do with ADHD folks needing more stimulation to regulate their brains, so if you do have ADHD, it might be worth running a test on weekends to see whether it helps you. I don't recommend testing it on a school night, just in case it does the opposite for you - but if it does work on the weekend, it's worth trying on a school night.

[@WanderingWriter]

Sleepy lives matter 😴

[@LeoS.B.Rosevillte]

Facts

[@Washaxbun]

Im fucking insomnia

[@Lawfair]

This is just another of "those things" that we doing to our health and well being to comply with our social order. It doesn't make sense to try and fix this one issue in isolation. For instance, does it make sense for students to be workers as well? Is the school day to long, or too focused on the wrong material? Why aren't adults making enough money to support their families? Why are they on the schedule they are on... is it absolutely necessary? Would school transportation be improved if it had more funding, or if we had more schools? Conversely are the problems associated with improper sleep schedules severe or significant enough to warrant massive change... could we do more to accommodate people on an individual level, having things like early bird or night owl school and/or work options?

[@たいよりない先生]

As a teacher, I'm actually pro homeschool. School is too early in America. Teachers also act like there are no other classes except their own when they assign homework. American school system needs to revamped and school is not as important as people believe it's the only way people will learn anything.

[@michaelpowers4961]

The ideal start time would be whatever was best for the kids. Economic concerns, like school bus schedules and work, shouldn’t factor in at all. Factoring them in is sending the message that someone else making money off of their labor, in the case of work, or saving money, in the case of bussing, is more important than their health and well-being, as well as their ability to learn. That then sets them up to think that their health and well-being doesn’t matter, and that others economic interests are more important. It sets up a culture for people to go to work sick because they don’t want to disappoint anyone, or to work longer hours because they want to be seen as a team player, or take fewer days off to to be seen as good. Basically, doing this to kids in school is setting them up to be good little workers who don’t question things and work themselves to death. Great for bosses, not so much for workers.

[@ateddybear1392]

6:25 for me it’s like 12-1am to 9-10am. I’m far more awake, energized and motivated at 9-10pm than earlier.. which sucks since I go to work at 5am lol

[@michdem100]

Hmmm, here's what I think. As for drifting sleep schedule, I don't see it as an issue to be honest. It will shift, of course, but then it's gonna reach some point, where it just stays. So like for some people it will be going to sleep at midnight or 1 am. It really depends from person to person, but for sure it's not gonna just go round and round. Work after school? Well... I may be too European for this, but it feels like teenagers should focus on school and not labor. At the same time - hey, maybe some shifts would be just later as well? For example waiters - from what I know, in the USA is not a profession one stays until retirement. Lastly transportation. It may sound a bit harsh, but you guys should fix your transportation system. For a very long time I though school buses were an only American thing, as I've never seen them over here, in Poland. That was until I've learned they exist in some municipalities, which also fall into what we call "transport exclusion" - areas where if you don't have a car, you can basically go fuck yourself, as there are no alternatives whatsoever. However for most parts, students and pupils here basically use public transport - the exact same one as the rest of us do. Primary school kids might be too young for that (though I did travel alone at that age on public transport), but highschoolers are old enough, for sure. Additionally it's gonna dive the kids more independence and a sort of humility. You got late? The bus/tram/train is not gonna wait for you, so better hurry up. You missed it and had to catch another one or it got delayed? Tough, now you're gonna sit/stand there, as it goes, knowing you're gonna be late while you have nothing to do. Humility.

[@mikitz]

Where I'm from, we believe the teachers are there for the kids and not the other way around.

[@j.rinker4609]

I did wake up at 4 am for quite a while, but getting up at 3:30 am was too early. I don't enjoy getting ready for bed at 7 pm, as I have no personal life then. Perhaps I am a VERY late bloomer, as I wasn't interested in staying up really late in high school, and got up early then.

[@xdoo11ddf255]

In Toronto Canada my child's school starts at 9:15 am and ends at 3:45 we do not have to be out of the house too early and it is nive

[@vanizis]

school should definitely start later cuz when i started middle school is when i started getting more and more tired UP TO THE POINT I STARTED FALLING ASLEEP IN ORCHESTRA AND PHYS ED !! i woke up at 7 and then stayed till 3 and if there was after school clubs that day then till 4 and then we had homework everyday tests as soon as school started and 2 weeks into school and we were doing end of the quarter exams when it was over a month till we actually finished it , never actually felt so tired till i moved into middle school and only ever actually felt energized when it was offdays or weekends .

[@jasonfisher8689]

Haw about using a good old fashioned paper book before bed instead of screens.

[@TexasNationalist1836]

Public schools are doing this already, not just with sleep but it’s their entire purpose

[@GrimReaperPTD]

It probably depends on a person by person basis as well since even when younger some people can easily fall asleep at 7 or 8 pm and the wake up at 4 AM. Then if they don't go to bed and stay awake they can't fall asleep till 2am.

[@rimfire8217]

I never knew how Early school started until I got an actual job.

[@profilore]

People keep blaming phones for these things, but i was perfectly capable of not sleeping untill 4 am at 12 before smartphones even existed, before i had internet. Reading books. Or just staring at the ceiling.

[@Zamiroh]

I always used to be a night owl and hated getting up early for school. Now that I am much older, I find I am usually in bed around 1030 and am up between 5 to 6 in the morning.

[@Shythalia]

This isn't just an American problem either. The high school I went to always hates it when students (like me) arrive late and they would punish us by doing stuff which makes us miss even more of the lessons being taught in class. Jerks. And then they keep giving us the same useless "advice" of "jUsT mAnAge yOuR tiMe bEtTeR". Even worse when they moved the starting time to EVEN EARLIER because they want to "motivate" us to stop being late so much. LIKE THAT HELPS!! So much for being a proudly science & math-focused school. Don't even actually care about the students.

[@kristalpower292]

Your circadian rhythm is also influenced by daylight hours. A lot of people may sleep less hours or go to sleep later due to the sunlight. The US summer break is also longer so if you don't fill in that time with a regular schedule its easier to get out of your school sleep habits. I would have thought the earlier start times would be more for parents to drop kids off at school on the way to work. This is the discussion that's happening in Australia now with wanting to change start times. Which is an interesting thought because its really the duration at school that makes it tricky for parents to do pick up or drop off. in Australia, school buses are also public buses in that they are used for a school route then in school hours that bus will also make regular public transport runs. They can also be used for when a school has an excursion or Americans would call a field trip. So in this way, there are buses that might only take primary school kids to school or high school kids to school. There may also be routes that drop off kids at Both oh might drop kids off at a public school and a private school. which allows more kids to get to school at similar times no matter if they are primary school age or high school age. Kids may also travel on public buses and trains to school with a pass that allows them to travel to school at no cost. Said to me, the bus to school issue could be solved if you look at how you provide transport to school. The other consideration is parents with kids at all levels of school together the Easier it is for parents to drop all kids off and More public transport options there are the easier it is for older kids to get themselves to school.

[@Merennulli]

I definitely feel the banker's hours scheduling has damaged society as a whole. It's consistently showing in these studies to hurt development of the youth we supposedly care about until it's mildly inconvenient for scheduling. But it also doesn't work for adults both in trying to function on a bad offset from our circadian rhythm AND as consumers trying to interact with businesses that don't provide sufficient paid leave (if any) while working people the same hours as the businesses they need to interact with in our society.

[@MrTerry]

See what I think of popular history KZbin channel, Oversimplified! kzbin.info/www/bejne/jGHZeGehnr-dmNU

[@fkj77]

At 9:40 The twins study was on separated at birth twins .

[@vladyvhv9579]

From junior high on, my problem wasn't anything to do with screen time, as that wasn't a thing. It was the absolute flood of busy work assigned by the teachers. I'd be up until 2-3 am and eventually stop when I could no longer make sense of the words and numbers on the pages. And often, still had to try to figure out what assignments I could turn in incomplete, in order to complete the ones that I had to give priority to.

[@totsukabladez369]

I'm having this exact problem in college. Not only is there more work now, but as time progresses, we will have even MORE information than we do now. This means that the future generations will have to do even more work and get less sleep because they have to learn more and obviously the human brain isn't meant to withhold so much information, especially for children, and especially now that technology has advanced this far. Our technology's light progresses so far, but our people have yet to adapt to the darkness it leaves in its wake.

[@heroslippy6666]

Busy work is horrible. Unnecessary stress and it produces no real value. Even in college many profs have that problem.

[@heroslippy6666]

@@totsukabladez369 I place great value in note taking. The mind isn't built for remembering hyper specific information about thousands of things However I take notes in a completely different style from a school environment.

[@Shythalia]

We still have that same problem despite the screens.

[@Temporaryusername-i4h]

Public schools should be as a last ditch option for families in severe poverty. With private and charter, and homeschooling being the main options

[@kineuhansen8629]

had bad experiance at school so so destroying the brain sound abit to accurate

[@Boodieman72]

Schools should use 9am to 3pm but have more school days a year, like they do in the UK.

[@killman369547]

That sounds better. I remember my school experience felt like they were trying to cram as much knowledge into my head as fast as possible and send me on my way. It would be nice to have a little extra time to digest and sort through that knowledge so more of it stuck and i didn't have to prioritize which information was truly important and what i could let slide.

[@kristalpower292]

Here I am thinking 9am start times were hard. I would constantly be late to school if I had to be there before 7am. Even as an adult trying to get up at like 6am is a struggle cannot imagine doing that as a kid. If you live a distance from the school how early are kids getting up to get to school. Like 5am. Who thought that was a good idea.

[@Foyay_Red]

As a Hasidic Jew I have high school from 7 am to 8 pm and that’s and the average is from 7 am to 9 or 10 pm

[@estongyamot9123]

Meanwhile in the Phils ... 7am is the norm

[@Scottshodgepodge]

I’m 52 now so my memory of this may be cloudy but I feel like grades 1-12 our schedule here in Minnesota was 8-3. It would not have hurt my feelings much if both of those times had been an hour later! lol. (Oh btw Mr Terry, SKOL Vikings! Let’s beat Detroit! 6-0!)

[@Scottshodgepodge]

Bear in mind that I attended school in like the Paleolithic era! We didn’t have to deal with any of this seven AM crap!

[@herzimhimmel]

Do US schools have shift schedule? Because when I was student in my country we had two shifts: one week from 7:30 AM and the next from 1:30 PM, and we all loved the second shift a lot more!

[@jawadalam5014]

my school starts at 8:50 so im chill

[@Twonicus80]

The entire premise of western society would have to change to make any meaningful difference. As long as all adults have to work all the time just to survive in a reasonable manner, we will always be sacrificing huge chunks of childhood development at the altar of capitalism.

[@ryanwilson_canada]

My sons school starts at 9am, he leaves the house about 20 to, done at 4pm, home by 4:20. He is in 11th grade now, until this year (all my life) school was 8:30-1:50 (k-3) 2:50 (4-8) and 3:30 (9-12), which never bothered me a whole lot, ive some friends from other places that their school started really way too early, did it help or hurt? I do agree with starting a bit later, because teens never go to bed. Lol. Jk, but the more sleep the better in my opinion.

[@stephanieperry1119]

Did schools really start at 9 am on average in 1920? Was this at least for the most because all students walked to school then? If that data point is true then how ot shifted the earlier times by exactly when.

[@heroslippy6666]

Mandatory nap time.

[@LeoS.B.Rosevillte]

Yes

[@alenefitzgerald4454]

Mr Terry, I love your reactions to stuff and you are always fair in your opinions. But I have got to let you know how dystopian it sounds when you say some high schools have to start at 7am so that the kids can get to work after classes. That my dear is some dickensian nonsense.

[@MrTerry]

I’m saying that’s been an argument historically for early start times. Not sure how you took it a different way.

[@RoseNZieg]

I think the schedule is fine because that mimic the schedule they will be expected to have as an adult. unless they opt for the third shift I don't see why developing the habit is bad.

[@jankusthegreat9233]

I'm early

[@LJ-pi6np]

I guess there's one guy who wants to leave the house for HS at 6!

[@Nitehawke]

Unfortunately, we bus kids to school and those routes take time to run. We also have limited numbers of buses and those buses have to pick up the elementary school kids after they do the middle/high school runs. Starting later also means ending later. So how much do you want to screw up everyone's evening? What time do you want those after school activities to begin and end? If you want your kid to get more sleep, drive them to school and drop them off at the last minute. And I'm just throwing this out there: I'm Gen X. We didn't have nearly the issues today's kids seem to have. Maybe the problem is the life they're living, not the time they're getting up.

[@TheHorzabora]

I’m Gen X. I had those problems, plenty of my friends did as well. We just didn’t have a forum to speak about them, or if we did, we were told to put up and shut up.

[@Nitehawke]

@@TheHorzabora you must be super special then because no one I know of my generation has nearly as many psychological and emotional issues of the current generation coming to "adulthood" (and I use that term in reference to chronological age only).

[@04nimmot]

schools start that early in the US? It's always been 9:00 until 15:30 in the UK

[@hollunk6969]

And college (at least for me) is 9am till 4:15pm

[@Grim_enigma]

what? not universally across the uk at least, mine started at 8:45 since secondary and it started to end later when i started year 10 and they introduced a 5th period . we often had 5pm finishes 2004-2010 and i just checked my schools schedule now, they now start at 8:35am and at 3:05pm. either way still waking up at 7-7:30

[@f0rth3l0v30fchr15t]

This could be either the cause or effect of the US being so weird.

[@georgiykireev9678]

Russian here, my times were similar but varied school to school - first school started at 8:30 (that's actually one of the reasons I switched), second started at 8:50, and the third began at 9. When I got to uni though, it felt like heaven - most days were scheduled to begin at 12:40, with earlier starts only happening on the big, 4+ subject days

[@oldgus01]

It depends on the school district in the US, but yes. Somewhere between 6:00 and 7:30 in the morning for most schools.