Cracked: 5 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Make Kids Smarter

[GhostofSparta]

5 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Make Kids Smarter

http://www.cracked.com/article_19254_5-surprisingly-easy-ways-to-make-kids-smarter.html

There is an endless debate about why school kids in the Western world are falling behind everyone else. Some say it's a shameful lack of funding; others say kids these days are too lazy and too busy Twittering on their iPads about the Justin Biebers to learn calculus.

But there are actually things you can do to help kids learn that cost next to nothing. For instance, studies show that kids do better if you ...

#5.

Start the School Day Later (By Just One Hour)

Here's something every goddamned kid knows, and that parents have been ignoring since the beginning of time.

Sneak a quick peek around your office/classroom/rodeo clown school. Chances are you're going to see one co-worker yawning and rubbing her eyes, another guy pulling the droopy-lid zombie glare and one person who is as chipper and alert as a coked-up bunny rabbit. How do we know? Because two out of three adult Americans are walking around sleep-deprived, that's how. And we push our messed-up sleep patterns off on our kids.

And our emotional problems.

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And for those kids, particularly teenagers, sleep deprivation can mean failure at school. Which is why schools that pushed their start time back are reporting remarkable improvements. One school in England reported that persistent absenteeism dropped by 27 percent, while a high school in Toronto, Canada, claimed that the 11th-grade math failure rate dropped from 45 percent to 17 percent. Not only that, but kids going to school later say that they're less depressed, and their parents claim that their kids are easier to deal with.

"He's still terrible at art, but at least the cat's alive in this one."

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Why Does This Work?

Because of a hormonal switch in the natural body clock, teens are often not sleepy late at night, unlike most adults and small children, so they stay up late. But then we force them to be at school by 7:30 a.m. As a result, most teens are getting something like 6.9 hours of sleep rather than the nine hours they need. That two-hour difference may not sound like much, but it makes a HUGE difference in the classroom. As many as 20 percent of students end up falling asleep in class altogether.

And not because she was trading on the Chinese markets at 3 a.m., the little scamp.

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And falling asleep in class isn't even the worst-case scenario. Remember how chronic sleep deprivation can lead to a host of ailments in adults? Now put those symptoms on an already hormonally screwed up teenage body and see how well things work out for you. (They don't.) Which is probably why schools that have taken the initiative of pushing back their school day for teens are reporting such high success rates. One district even saved $700,000 a year by making the change, since the new schedule actually required fewer buses. Who would have thought that giving in to teenager laziness would actually result in good news all around?

Not us, because we just don't understand.

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Read more: 5 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Make Kids Smarter | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19254_5-surprisingly-easy-ways-to-make-kids-smarter.html#ixzz1PdkWtfDN

[Chump Bailey]

I would add better nutrition to that too.

[TheDoyler23]

Damn, I love cracked.com. I've spent so many hours going from list to list!

[Riggo-toni]

I would add better nutrition to that too.

Yeah, definitely, though I guess that's more home/parent related than teacher/school responsibility.

[Hubbs]

Couldn't agree more, although I'm an extreme case. I was never as well-prepared for my first or second classes of the day as I was for the later ones. I bet that if I went back and broke down my grades by the time of day I had each class, there would be a strong pattern of my grades going up as the day went on.

[GhostofSparta]

The thing I really like about this list is that 4 out of the 5 things listed would cost most schools nothing (the window one being the exception for some schools with interior rooms), and would be a good start to reforming education while costing little but a schedule shift. Now the 20 minute walk before a test thing would be much easier to implement in elementary school, where most kids spend a majority of the day with 1 teacher, than in a HS, where kids see 8 different teachers a day for about 40-45 minutes each. But then, most of the high schools around here have the gym open in the morning for kids to just walk around with their friends for 10-20 minutes until the halls are open anyway, so just making it mandatory might be the way to do it there.

[mardi gras skin]

Hooking the teacher up to a microphone is a tremendous idea. I used to need an hour or two to rest my throat after my last class. I wasn't yelling but just projecting your voice all day can be pretty draining. And as long as its ok for the kids ears, I like that the teacher is operating at a dB level a notch above all the other noises in and around the classroom. Its got to help with their attention.