Remember how crazy high-school schedules used to be?
Waking up early and zombie-trotting off to class?
Retaining zero boring info the first hour?
Wondering if we were dead or in a lucid dream?
Yeah, well scientists are starting to question whether early start times are good. But, a study recently done with the aim of looking at that shone some light on more than just those dark hours of morning. Looking at 718 Kentucky elementary schools, it was noted that earlier start times indeed meant worse performance for many students – if the kids were from middle or upper class background.
Kids in disadvantaged schools? Absolutely no difference.
Why is this?
Well, the clip I watched didn’t go too far into it. But you know what it did remind me of? That “Through the Wormhole” episode that aired a few weeks ago. In his sweet, avuncular, I-could-forgive-him-anything voice, Morgan Freeman posed the following: is poverty genetic?
While not literally – it seems to be environmentally inherited. Those with parents living from paycheck to paycheck actually have brains that develop differently. After taking MRIs, they saw that the poor kids has less development in their hippocampus (that’s the part that helps with learning, memory, and stress regulation) and prefrontal cortex (which aids in memory, perception, motor control) while the rich kids developed normally.
The most salient point? These kids started out the same.
Their environment stomped down the parts that make ‘em ambitious.
(play at 9:00 minutes):
A couple commenters on the “start school later” topic agreed it should start later, some said “just get to sleep earlier!” and others yet insisted a Starbucks express would solve all the world’s problems instead. While I can never argue on adding in a café anywhere, I do have a “yes-and” to offer.
As for earlier sleep – that’s hard if you’re following social orders about resume-building for college by doing extracurriculars between the end of the school day and bed time. I remember not getting home until 9 on some volleyball game nights. And I dunno about you, but my body needs some conscious me time – not just the unconscious time I’m drooling on a pillow and the conscious time I’m performing tricks like a circus animal from a school seat.
It would seem that if they dedicated the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the day to meditation (hear me out ’cause there’s a celebrity endorsement coming) and offered yoga at lunch, it’d help out a lot of kids. It’s so funny how I’m afraid to use those words because of how much society has branded the same kind of eyeroll-stamp on it as prayer or peace or love. And – getting back to the impoverished kids whose brains are still developing – why not do what works before they’re trapped in the same cycle? Celebrities from Russell Brand to Russell Simmons will tell you yoga is free and it works – for anyone.
And the latter dude has proven it by taking in youths for his Life Camp.
Here’s how one kid from the projects benefited from the yoga program:
On a scientific level, both of meditation and yoga just allow you to calm down, feel comfortable, and open your mind up for the day. “Restful awareness” – the state meditation puts you in – has actually been proven in studies to help counteract effects sleep deprivation (getting back to the original “zombie” state issue) and improve work performance for all kids – regardless of class.
(Mr. Simmons talking about why he does what he does):
There’s this school out in Iowa where the kids get to sit around and meditate with blankets a couple times during the school day. I’m retrospectively jealous of these lil shits because they seem so chill and mature. (Wish I’d been taught how to meditate early on instead of born into the same dogma cult almost everyone I know and am related to was.) If you’ve never done it before, it’s hard to understand how it works. But from personal experience, I think of it as being like a pre-jog stretch sesh. The more loose and fluid I am before I take to the road, the better the quality, the longer I can go, and the better I feel afterward.
What if the whole day could feel like that?
Indeed, a mere ten or fifteen minutes of sitting up watching my thoughts whizz by makes the whole day a whole lot easier. There’s nothing mystical about it. Nothing religious. I’m not knocking my country – but we were asked to be born American about as much as we were asked to be born at all – or into a society that tells us we have to go school until we’re 18. So if we can be forced to say the pledge of allegiance in a school we’re forced to go to, why not be invited to sit in calm silence and reset our schizo-thought pasta before the day begins?
(See, society? Look “wat” you’ve done now. #duckdapolice)
If kids who have developed restricted brain regions that are crucial to success, could that become epigenetic? In other words – could they pass down their reduced brain capacity to the next generation? I dunno. That kid at yoga camp seemed pretty serene for a dude from the projects who saw his dad die. And if kids like Juquille who went through violence and poverty can be turned around to prevent that question from even being an issue – why not do that on a mass scale? Make peace the free way?
Unless, of course, the aim is to keep the poor down at a poor performance level?