Most teens don’t naturally fall asleep until about 11 p.m., and are supposed to get about nine hours of sleep per night. “But I think that we could get much closer to optimizing for students, parents, teachers.” The school day, Brown says, could be improved in two main ways: It could start later, and it could go longer.Ī later start, in both middle and high school, would help with the later sleep cycles that are typical in teenage years. “I don’t know about making everyone perfectly happy,” says Catherine Brown, the vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. But a few changes could mitigate that frazzling significantly. The result is a school day that frazzles just about everybody. The schedules that dictate most of American K-12 life descend from times when fewer households had two working parents. It’s not entirely clear who the school day does revolve around. Why does the school day end two hours before the workday? As Kara Voght recently wrote in The Atlantic, that leaves a daily gap of unsupervised time for many children, forcing their parents to find affordable care for their kid or to adjust their own working schedule. Their lives also tend to be mismatched with school-day schedules, which usually end a good two hours before the typical American workday does. The world, apparently, does not revolve around parents either. The average start time for public high schools, 7:59, requires teens to get up earlier than is ideal for their biological clocks, meaning many teens disrupt their natural sleep patterns every school day. Indeed it doesn’t, as they are reminded every school-day morning when disabling their alarms. The world does not revolve around you, teens are often told.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |