George Will's article in the Washington Post

Yesterday, Mr. Will wrote an interesting article about the way to ruin a child.  He brings up some things that some of us who see high school kids every day think are common sense, but it is great to see him bringing them up as people tend to believe commentators with political clout more than your average high school teacher!

Go ahead and read the article here but pay particularly close attention to the part about why we start high school when we do and the various physical and psychological effects.  As a teacher, I find ways to deal with the fact that my students are still generally asleep at 7:30 and just starting to come around an hour or sometimes two hours later.  Obviously I can't change the starting time of my school or anybody else's school, but I could add reams of anecdotal evidence to support what Will points out, namely that putting kids in high school is good for some people, but certainly not for the kids!

I have a friend who attended the same high school I teach in many years ago, a few friends actually.  Back then, they went from 9 or 9:30 to 3:00.  These friends have widely varying careers, from welding to engineering nuclear power plants.  They don't appear to be any less intelligent or have dealt with any less complicated issues or questions than the students I have today.  So why must we have them in school at hours that are unhealthy for them?

And please don't think that I would mind being at school from 7:30 to 3:00, generally I am there from 6:30 until at least 4:30 already, but that includes coaching and some time for me to exercise.  If I had the 90 minutes from 7:00 until 9:30 to plan or grade or do whatever I needed to do, I can guarantee that every lesson would be better, feedback would get back sooner, and if my students got out at 3:00, I would be happy to bet that their test scores or many other measures of "student achievement" would certainly not go down and likely would climb.  An extra hour of sleep would change the entire landscape of most of my students' lives.  There is absolutely nothing I or any other teacher could do that would have anything like that positive effect.

But if we were really trying to do what is best for our students and our kids, starting later would be one in a flurry of changes that would quickly revolutionize the way we approach education in this country.  So I don't want to pretend that it is the only thing to fix either, but it is one that seems obvious enough even for the educational establishment not to be able to ignore much longer.  I hope.