Tired of Early Start

Carl Woock, 17, a senior at Walter Johnson High School in Montgomery County, where school begins at 7:25 a.m.:

I find that it is absolutely agonizing to wake up before 7 a.m. in order to get to school. Every day, I wake up around 6:30 a.m., take a shower, drive to school with droopy eyelids, then sleep through my first two periods. After lunch I have calculus, which is perhaps the most boring subject ever taught, and since the room is always hot and my teacher speaks in a soft monotone, I inevitably nod off in that class, too.

I am not narcoleptic, nor am I a bad student who doesn't try to do well in school. The problem is that I am never tired before 11 p.m. or even midnight. I usually have my homework done well before then, but the temptations of AOL Instant Messenger and drawn-out conversations with my girlfriend before I go to bed dig into time reserved for sleeping.

I don't suppose that it's the school's fault that I choose to stay up . . . but the fact of the matter is that teens have a different circadian cycle than adults or children. It aggravates me that third-graders, who are awake at 7 a.m. anyway, don't go to school until much later, and high-schoolers, who look forward to snow days and delayed starts more than their own birthdays, trudge around the halls like zombies, and their work (and quality of life) suffers because of that. We just aren't meant to be up this early!