My wife and I homeschool our kids. My wife, Deeper Thought, is a notorious late riser, as are all our kids. When I explained to my 9 year old that, being from rural Indiana, I got on the bus at 6:45 every morning in order to make it in time for the 7:25 first bell, he reacted with the horror of a lead character in a Lovecraft short story seeing Nyarlathotep. They all roll out of bed around 9 am, get a leisurely breakfast, and start school at 10:30, finishing at 5:30, just in time for dinner.

Me? I was in the Army for 8 years. I get up at 4:45, slip out of the house, and get to work at 6 am, dedicating myself to annoying my co-workers with a cheerful smile and a hearty “Good Morning! Lovely day, eh?” just to watch them squirm in impotent rage. After all, until they’ve had 3 cups of coffee they don’t have the energy to kill me.

As Bob Dylan wrote: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift; Look out kid, they keep it all hid.”

I don’t get it. There are 24 hours / day no matter when you get up. Starting the school day later won’t create more time. Although my children have a school start time of 8:20 so perhaps I just don’t have the personal experience.

From one night owl to another…Amen, brother!

We get started around 10:30 a.m. in this homeschool and go till about 4:30 p.m. But the beauty of it is…no homework! (Or, it’s all homework—depending on how you look at it.) So yeah, homeschooling is way more efficient.

Sometimes I think homework is just a sneaky way to force parental involvement. Seems like 6-7 hours every weekday would be more than sufficient time for academic instruction. Maybe they just devote that time to the social engineering, leaving the three R’s to the parents’ and students’ downtime? Just speculating…none of mine has ever seen the inside of a school.

Personally—if the morning people must rule—I’d like to see siesta time instituted into the school- and workday. But that’s just me.

I hear ya there. I was fortunate in that my highschool allowed seniors to have a choice of start 1 period late or leave 1 period early. I know a lot of people who did the leave early but they were usually dead all day. I picked start late…still put me in there at 8:20 am, but that’s still a lot better than 7:10.

What doesn’t help anyone is that so many of the homework assignments are insane BS anymore. In 7th grade math class one time we had to make an equation that spelled out a sentence. All A’s were the same value, all b’s the same value, etc. You had to use multiplication within the word and addition/subtraction to seperate the words, with the last word being the answer. We had 1 night to do it in. I had my mom helping me literally from the time I got home to the time I left for school the next day trying to figure it out. I was one of 4 people in the class to have an answer, which set the teacher off on how ‘lazy’ all of us were.

That was par for the entirety of my school life since moving to Ohio too, ugh. It also didn’t help any at all that until Trig class we were expected to do every math operation on a seperate line. So instead of doing all the addition at once and making the equation solvable in 3-4 lines and maybe 1 minute of writing time it often took the entirety of a complete side of a college ruled piece of notebook paper to solve 1 problem.