The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes?
Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically solvable with caffeine and nagging, or are we shooting ourselves in the collective foot here?
As I am emphatically not a morning person myself, I’m no fan of 8am classes either, but as Dean Dad notes, they’re a necessary evil given the constraints of limited classroom space. I don’t know any good ways to deal with this– fortunately for me, one of my colleagues likes teaching at 8am, and usually jumps on those sections of the big courses– but I’ve always been fond of the suggestion made by a colleague in another department, which is basically a Jedi mind trick: open a 7am class slot.
The thinking here is that most of the problem students have with the 8am class stems from it being the first class of the morning. They’re just fine with 9am, mostly because they know it could be worse– they could have an 8am class. If you got rid of 8am classes, they’d piss and moan about 9am classes.
So, if you put a 7am class block on the books, then 8am would no longer be the earliest class block. You wouldn’t even need to schedule much of anything into it, save for the occasional elective class by one of those older professors who gets into the office at 6am anyway. Knowing that they could’ve been stuck with a 7am class will make 8am seem much more palatable, and improve student attitudes in the early hours.
As a plan, it seems to rely too heavily on the gullibility of college students, but then, insert your own favorite paraphrase of Barnum and/or Mencken here. It’s at least as good as any of the other options, as far as I can tell. But anyone with better suggestions should feel free to leave them in the comments.
(One side note: as the Dean Dad notes, one problem of the 8am section is that it’s the last choice of a lot of students who are too disorganized to register early enough to get one of the other sections. This is countered somewhat by the fact that it’s the first choice for another group of students, namely those who have a need for early classes. Locally, this means the handful of ROTC students we have (who have afternoon ROTC things over in Albany, so can’t take afternoon classes), and athletes (particularly baseball players, who regularly have doubleheaders starting at 1pm), both groups who tend to have enough discipline to make it to 8am classes and do well in them.)
Sounds like a question for Bora.
An anecdote to be used as data:
Currently we have 8 am classes in theory, but realistically the first classes of the day start at 9 am (the 8 am classes may be intro language courses or something, but all the classrooms in the science area are completely empty until 9).
These mythical classes do not seem to prevent complaints from students regarding the early morning classes. Nor does it stop students from sleeping through class (either in their apartment/dorm or in the classroom).
Sounds like a question for Bora.
Maybe, but I doubt I’d have time to read the answer.
If you got rid of 8am classes, they’d piss and moan about 9am classes.
I have anecdata to support this theory. At my undergraduate alma mater, we didn’t have 8am classes. There might have been a few 8:30 classes (1.5 hour blocks), but for the most part classes didn’t start until 9. The majority of my dorm mates who got stuck with 9am classes griped about it.
Uhhh, I don’t think this would work. At Stanford there were plenty of very early classes, some language classes started before 8. But I still couldn’t stay awake in my 9 AM class Freshman year. It doesn’t really matter when the earliest class at the university is, it matters what YOUR earliest class is, especially if they’re out of whack.
Senior year 9 AM classes were no problem, since I was no longer staying up until 2 or 3 AM for no reason every day.
I like getting up early, but I basically sleep walk through the first cup of coffee and paper. Why should it be any different for students? Especially when dorm life rages on into the early hours any night of the week, or the fact that procrastination keeps you up at night. In my senior year, I FINALLY had a schedule with classes that all started after 10AM (Most of our chemistry classes were 8-9 or 9-10, w/ labs in the afternoon), I always seemed to be on time, awake, and ready to work.
Once you solve this problem. What advice do we have for the 1PM food coma? Can’t tell you how many times I slept through my pre-lab lectures . . . in a class of 7.
BTW, thanks for the great posts.
In high school, school started at 7:30 AM and I usually had a first period*. Somehow it was easier knowing that everyone had to be there by at least 8:15 AM (second period started at 8:20 AM) and I wasn’t special. By the time I got to grad school, 8:45 AM electrodynamics seemed like a special kind of hell, even if all of us first-years were suffering together. Maybe because I had years where 8:30 classes where rare and my normal courseload usually started at 9:30, including a glorious semester where I had no morning classes on Thursdays and, thus, was only limited to when the dining hall stopped serving breakfast.
Of course, as a high schooler, I could also switch from 6 AM wakeup during the week to 9-11 AM wakeup during weekends with less trouble than now, so maybe I was just more resilient when I was young.
(I also went to bed earlier as a high schooler.)
* Even if I didn’t, I carpooled with my sister and a neighbor, both of whom had marching band which was for a half-hour before school and first period in the fall.
I remember sleeping late into the afternoon(4PM or so) on a day when I had a 2PM test. I missed nearly all 8AM classes and had to make do with copying notes from other people and (horror of horrors) reading the text books.
My favourite 8am prof would not let anyone in late. I think that helped a lot. He also threw a kid out for falling asleep.
Electrodynamics in the first year of _high school?_ Was that in Japan?
I once attended a Navy school that ran on a two-phase schedule. I (a Night Person) lucked out and got assigned to the night side. We ate breakfast at midnight. Lovely, but I never encountered it again.
BTW, I have an evolutionary explanation for the existence of Night People. It has to do with the usefulness to the tribe of one guy who could stay up all night to feed the fires and stare down the hyenas.
I had a lot of early morning classes back in my undergrad days, because theatre students can’t take evening classes (we’ve usually got shows going on in the evening). For myself, it wasn’t utterly horrible — I’ve been an insomniac with absolutely zero circadian rhythm since childhood, and am as likely to sleep at 4pm as 4am, so what time a class happens at is largely irrelevant to me. Other students had a lot of difficulty with it.
The one factor that DID make me curse those early classes, though? Bus schedules. Before 8am, many busses are still running on their “night” schedules. The bus I had to take to get up to the school ran once per hour until 8am (when it started running every 20 minutes) — and many students who lived in less easily accessible areas (I was lucky and lived a 5-minute walk from a major route) couldn’t catch busses at all so early in the morning, and were left with either walking a long distance to get to a bus route, organizing car pools, or taking a taxi in.
So in order to get to my 8am classes on time (in a program where profs generally said “if you’re not 5 minutes early, you’re late”), I had to catch a bus at 6:45am. I’d show up to the school at 7 on the dot (if the busses were running on time, which they often weren’t), and then have 55 minutes to kill before needing to be in my classroom. If I missed that 6:45 bus, I’d have to catch the 7:45 bus, which was usually packed FULL of other students, running a few minutes late, and sometimes if it was too full the driver would just go straight on past you without picking you up, and you’d have to wait for the 8:15 bus and be REALLY late. I’d end up rushing breathlessly into class at 5 minutes past 8 and getting a lecture from my prof about tardiness.
If profs want to make early morning classes easier on their students, they should get together (along with students) and pressure city transit systems to make it easier to get to those classes in reasonable order.
Wasn’t there recently a big study that found that teenagers (and likely younger college students) have delayed circadian rhythms? (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/teens-health/CC00019) In which case, many students may be responding to a legitimate disadvantage they face having to get to an 8am class. Sure, some people’s clocks are going to vary, and sometimes people have to make sacrifices to adapt to circumstances (athletics, ROTC, etc), but the student body as a whole would probably benefit from colleges taking this fact into consideration.
some observations:
— Night Owl’s observations about circadian rhythm. Teenagers are a bit off. Freshmen would be too.
— Work. When I was a Freshman I worked nights. Most jobs you were likely to have did that (waitressing/pizza delivery, or in my case an 8-4am shift as a security guard twice a week).
— Other classes. If classes came in a block that would make the whole thing easier to routinize. But my classes were always all over the place, even when I got it together to register early. (At my school there might be only one person teaching the class in question). Later on it was easier, but the first couple of years were a pain.
The 7am slot idea doesn’t seem like it would work all that well. People would get into a routine and you still get the sleep effect at 8am.
I discovered a year or so ago that there is a human mutation for early rising. This explains why my favorite classes (graduate school) were the ones that met at 0530 and my least favorite those that met at 2200.
I have no data on the topic at hand, just a story. My first semester of college I had a 7:30am class. In Philosophy. (I am very emphatically not a morning person.) It was a big lecture class and the teacher didn’t take attendance so I allowed myself one cut/week. I still made an A. Well, it was Philosophy.
I still think 7:30am classes should be against the law.
MKK
$#!+, Chad, it’s mostly physicists and mathematicians reading this blog: For a group this eccentric, an 8:00 am class doesn’t mean getting up too early, it means staying up too late.
I am still, many years later, bitter about the two artsies I overheard complaining about their horribly early class, which started at 12:30. So while your plan has a touch of Machiavellian genius about it, I dunno if it would work.