Why 8am classes should be avoided?

 I have successfully completed the hostel life of 9 years. One of the things that were common in all those years was early morning classes. During my school days, my classes would start at 6am. As a student, we always hated to attend the early morning as long as our crush was not in our class except a few. 

As data is becoming our religion, I am present the data that I collected from the book “Why we sleep”. In Minnesota, one of the schools shifted the starting time of the school to 8:30am (I still consider this early, at least for me) from 7:25am and the results are as

                    o Verbal SAT score increased to 761 from 605.

                    o Math SAT score increased to 739 from 683.

There was also reduction in the traffic accidents among drivers who were between 16 and 18 years of age (This happened in another school as a result of delaying the starting school starting time). So, what is the magic behind this? It is the thing we all love to do. That is sleep!

Sleep has its own benefits and it is somehow linked with memory. When you learn something, it gets stored in your short-term memory region in your brain called hippocampus. When you sleep after you have learnt something, the data from the hippocampus gets transferred to the long-term memory region called the cortex. The data gets transferred only during the NREM stage of sleep which occur high during the late morning hours. (One of the reasons why elder people are bad at remembering is because they are not generating enough NREM sleep.) So, the early morning class may prevent these data transfer and hence the poor performance by the students.

Source - "Why we sleep" By Matthew Walker