It’s around 6:15 a.m. and I’ve been up for about an hour already. (It’s a great time to blog). In a few minutes I’ll take my husband to the Metro. At 7 a.m. I’ll go in and kiss M. good morning and get her moving. And do it again at 7:30 . After countless reminders and the occasional voice raised in exasperation, she’ll by out the door and off to school by 8:30 (a walker). And her sister? She’ll be fast asleep. Ah, the benefits of homeschooling. (M., for her part, resents it like hell.)
Starting around age 10 or 11 C.’s internal clock started to shift. What had been a 9 p.m. bedtime started to drift later and later. Truth be told even with that reasonable 9 o’clock bedtime she often had a hard time falling asleep. Like many highly gifted kids, she just couldn’t shut off her brain. Her “motor” has always run fast. (In consolation I tell sleepless parents of infants and toddlers that not needing much sleep is actually a sign of intelligence. It is!*) Nowadays it’s not unusual for C. to be up at 11 or 12 or even 1 a.m., long after her father and I have gone to bed. And correspondingly, she wakes much later as well.
All of which is perfectly normal, as Nancy Kalish points out in today’s New York Times op-ed, “The Early Bird Gets the Bad Grade.” She writes:
Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.
She cites a few examples of a few places around the country where school districts have experimented with later start times and have seen (those all-important) test scores go up and behavior and drop out rates decrease. It’s been an issue that’s been kicked around locally as well. (Here too.) It’s been written about by local students. Recently while driving somewhere in the car my kids came up with this suggestion: Just swap the high school and elementary school start times since little kids tend to be up at the crack of dawn anyway.
So why haven’t any of these sensible measure been implemented more widely? The answer, as always, is money…and the convenience of the adults of the world. The cost of additional bus service, the inconvenience to teachers and parents, and the impact on those all-important after school athletics all take precedence.
C. knows that she has a sweet deal…it’s one of the things she can jokingly lord over her friends who attend school. We’ve reminded her that when she goes back to regular school next year a whole new wind is going to blow–and to make matters worse, she potentially is going to have to ride a bus all the way to Rockville or a Metro to northwest DC. Secretly, I can see it becoming a deal breaker for her…lots more work, not enough sleep, getting up at an ungodly hour…. Homeschooling with college classes is going to look a whole lot more appealing unless the social benefits and academic milieu of high school are truly spectacular.
[*"A little known observation concerning sleep in gifted individuals is that about twenty percent of gifted children seem to need significantly less sleep than other children, while another twenty percent appear to need significantly more sleep than other children. Parents report that these sleep patterns show themselves very early in the child's life, and long-term follow up suggests that the pattern continues into adulthood (Webb & Kleine, 1993; Winner, 2000). Some highly gifted adults appear to average comfortably as few as two or three hours sleep each night, and they have indicated to me that even in childhood they needed only four or five hours sleep." From Webb, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children.]
To play devil’s advocate, I actually had much more trouble getting my kids up and out the door when they were younger (in part because I myself was sleep-deprived from dealing with the youngest). I certainly wouldn’t have been happy about young kids going to school in the dark, especially waiting for a bus in the dark. Also, many people want elementary school hours to match work hours pretty closely (cuts down on childcare costs). For high schools, it gets very difficult to schedule athletic events if schools are on all different schedules and therefore get out at different times in the afternoon.
My middle-school kids have a long commute to magnet programs right now, and I keep looking longingly at the high school that’s walking distance from us — but they both say they want to go to the high school where most of their friends will be, which will be essentially the same bus they take now.