Lie-in for teenagers has positive results (starting school at 10 am)

[FarCenter]

By Margaret Ryan
BBC News

A school that has allowed its pupils to start the day an hour later says it has seen absenteeism decline.

At Monkseaton High School, in North Tyneside, 800 pupils aged 13-19 have started lessons at 10am since October.

Early results indicates that general absence has dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.

Head teacher Paul Kelley said that changing the school day could help towards creating "happier, better educated teenagers".

Mr Kelley said it was now medically established that it was better for teenagers to start their school day later in terms of their mental and physical health and how they learn better in the afternoon.

"It is a question of do schools fit the medical reality of teenagers?" he said.

The experiment of starting the school an hour later is being overseen by scientists, including an Oxford neuroscience professor Russell Foster.

He performed memory tests on pupils at the school which suggested the more difficult lessons should take place in the afternoon.

He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years - meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do.

Prof Till Roenneberg, who is an expert on studying sleep, said it was "nonsense" to start the school day early.

He said: "It is about the way our biological clock settles into light and dark cycles. This clearly becomes later and later in adolescence."

Prof Roenneberg said if teenagers are woken up too early they miss out on the most essential part of their sleep.

"Sleep is essential to consolidate what you learn," he said.

<snip>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8579951.stm

[Drunken Irishman]

1. My school started at 8:25 every morning. WTF?

[elleng]

2. So I'm normal after all!!!

[FarCenter]

4. My recollection of college course reservation is that early sections are not sought after

Something like a 10 am start of the day in college seemed ideal.

[tridim]

7. As a freshman I got stuck in a 7:00am physics lab, on freaking Saturday.

I wanted to kill whoever decided that Saturday morning science labs were a good idea.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Your mastery of understatement is awe-inspiring. ;^)

Be assured that most normal people do not like to TEACH that early in the morning either. It appalled me that the grad school I attended had 8AM General Chemistry classes every day, because of some lamebrained insistence that recitation sections (1hr) had to IMMEDIATELY precede labs (3hr) and the only way to fit both into the schedule was to have 8AM recitations. An intelligent use of their classroom space would have allowed recitation classes to meet any hour of the week, so only the Mon morning sections would have had to start at 8AM. Instead they left the recitation classrooms essentially vacant for 3/4 of the time.

Right now I am teaching an 8AM class again, and it is the hardest class I have to teach, simply because it is so much harder to be prepared to teach that early.

I count myself lucky that I attended an undergraduate institution which scheduled large lecture sections only from 10AM onward.

[Wanet]

3. Very interesting article

Our regular high school day starts at 8 a.m., but my daughter's jazz band starts at 7 a.m. Last year in 8th grade, jazz band started at 6:30 a.m. That was tough. -- Wanet

[dustbunnie]

5. The body releases HGH during sleep time. It's imperative for teenagers to get decent sleep.

As the article says, to achieve their maximum growth and health potential.

That's why teenagers have the capacity to regularly sleep 10 to 12 hours. Their bodies are releasing the hormone that gets them through the massive growth spurts.

This school sounds brilliant.

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. A diller, a dollar, A ten o'clock scholar. What makes you come so soon?

You used to come at ten o'clock

But now you come at noon!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. There's this crazy idea that getting up early is "virtuous" and sleeping in is "lazy"

If anyone starts school before 9:00AM it should be the littlest kids. They're naturally up at dawn anyway. But most school districts I know of do things the other way around: teenagers between 7:00 and 8:00 AM, little kids between 8:00 and 9:00.

The idea may be to prepare the teens for factory jobs, which usually start some time between 6:00 and 7:30 P.M. (It's part of the caste system in this country. When I worked temp, the industrial jobs always started at 7:30 AM or earlier and gave only 20-30 minutes for lunch. The office jobs started at 9:00 and gave an hour for lunch.)