We do not have cable television anymore. We watch shows via the internet. We rewatched the entire Psych series last fall and discovered episodes we had never seen before. That should not have come as a surprise. Like all children with a television in their home during the second half of the twentieth century, our childhood revolved around when our favorite shows played. Saturday morning cartoon, holiday parades—would we be allowed to stay up and watch Have Gun, Will Travel? It felt at the time like the major problem with bedtimes was missing something on the television, and that would not happen once were grown. 

But it did. We both had to work mornings during the original airing of Psych. Sometimes we looked at one another, knew we were tired. and went to bed before it started. Sometimes we tried to stay awake and woke to the closing credits. The clock was still not on our side.

“At some point in elementary school, many American children learn that Daylight Saving Time was originally intended to give farmers an extra hour of light to work the fields.

“That is, in fact, a lie.

“Farmers actually hated the practice, because it cut an hour of daylight in the morning, leaving them with an hour less to get goods to market, according to Michael Downing, author of the book Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. In reality, the extra hour of evening daylight was good for one thing: selling products.”—Zoë Schlanger, Environment reporter for Quartz

Recently, the candy lobby spent millions to ensure that children would have an extra hour of daylight to trick-or-treat, on the theory that trick-or-treating for an extra hour meant more candy and a thus a financial boon to that industry. Golf courses wanted more midweek greens fees. It was the Chambers of Commerce that lobbied hardest for that hour of shopping time after work.

What we read on a clock, other than indicating time passing, the actual time we read is a human construct. Time is real, but how we mark its passing is a simulation. The human body cares not a whit for eleven o’clock or whether it’s AM or PM. We are a diurnal species, evolved to be awake in light and hidden someplace safe and asleep during the day. Despite claims of “morning” or “night” person, all of us have eyes that are blinded by darkness. We need to sleep because our memory sorts information and our brains heal damage during sleep. We dream because that is part of our brains’ process of understanding and working through our lives. We need to sleep and our sanity and lives depend on sleep. People can die of sleep deprivation. That has happened. 

Clocks? Well, they exist and have become necessary in modern societies because people do not know how to recon time by the sun. 

But noon (what we mark as 12pm) is an actual thing, that time when the sun is closest to directly overhead in the sky. It is a “real” thing, not a human construct. If we wanted another hour of daylight at the end of our workday, we only have to shift our work time to an hour earlier—what happens when we move the hands of our clock has nothing to do with the real world, of course, because there is still noon. Real noon. High noon happening an hour too early according to our clocks.

If we want an actual extra hour we would need to live on another planet. 

This is where I refer to a single, brief experiment that supposedly proved that modern industrialized human beings evolved to exist on that imaginary other planet with the 25-hour day. Subjects were placed in a windowless room with control over artificial light and were found to stay awake longer and sleep their normal hours, developing a sleep-and-wakeful cycle of 25 hours. The study was done for a few weeks and the conclusion was that children needed to start school later in the morning. This was so that they could get an “extra hour” of sleep. 

Oh, dear. Does that mean that every day, school would be an hour later? The tardy bell would shift from 8am this morning to 9am tomorrow, 10 am on Friday. By Thanksgiving they’d have to skip a day altogether in order to bring start back to, you know, daytime again. 

What happens in real life is that starting school later is great that first morning, when children might or might not sleep in for an extra hour or wake up because their bodies’s circadian rhythm knows it is morning, and then finding they have plenty of time to get ready for school. (I will leave you to decide what might be the healthier option.) Then a few days or a week later, they’ve done what children often do: resisted going to sleep at an “earlier” bedtime and wakened still tired because they did not get enough sleep for a 9am start at school any more than they did when school started at 8. 

Most schools did not move school to a later hour, despite widespread clamoring, because parents need their students out of the house so they can go to work. Football coaches want daylight after school for practice time. Many of my students had jobs to go to after school if they didn’t play a sport. When I was first hired as a teacher, our entire schedule shifted in the spring term in response to DST. We dismissed before three, we started earlier to make up for that. But our accreditation as a public school depended on “seat time.” Just as most full-time American workers generally expect a 40-hour-week, Oregon students need 135 hours in front of a teacher to count as one of the 25 credits required for graduation (or anyway the teacher, some teacher, had to be there for that many hours). Moving start time was a nonstarter because the length of the school day was fixed, and for various reasons there were constraints on start and end times. 

During the four decades I taught in the local public high school, we tried all sorts of daily, term, and yearly schedules: three terms or just two, eight periods a day or six or five or just four, alternating A/B daily schedules or one day shortened. Starting classes a half hour earlier or later. Sometimes there was a clear vision to improve student learning, such as to reduce the number of student/teacher contacts in a day or to provide study time within the school day or a personal advisor/support for each student. Often the next system was adopted to achieve another goal without reference to what goal would be abandoned in the process. 

Inevitably, a gain meant some sort of loss. That loss might be greater than the gain. The goal of the change might itself be faulty.  

The principal at my high school once thought he had the solution to tardiness. Without announcing to students what he was doing for why, he set the master clock that controlled all classroom clocks back five minutes to give high school students an extra five minutes to get to class in the morning. He reset tardy bells for each period to add two minutes (from class time) to passing time so that students could get to lockers and toilets and also to class on time. That might have worked for a few days. 

In their very bodies, teenagers felt that tardy bell coming. Two extra minutes of passing time became expected. Students who had been habitually tardy were still habitually tardy. It was too long before the “solution” was abandoned as a failure. Tardies did not decrease, and for months the bell system trained students that a five minute passing period felt like seven. 

For months during this pandemic I was waking in the night, before midnight, after, close to sunrise. The times I woke up in darkness were inconsistent, but one thing I could rely on: before i fumbled and found my watch beside my bed, before I passed the stem to light up the time, I almost always knew within ten minutes. Three-thirty, I would think, and find it was 3:38. Oh, please let it not be only eleven! I would think, then hold my watch and it was 11:02. 

I should not have found this surprising, and after a while I didn’t. Many people do this. Our bodies know time. And that is why messing about with clocks, an hour back or forward, causes all sorts of problems. Whether you are a person who is aware of the time or not, most people sense time. There are situations that “seem to go on forever” but by and large, if we want to know, we do. Even before we check our watches. 

Even if you don’t believe any of this about the body sensing time, you have to believe the statistics: auto crashes are more common in the first weeks after the clock is changed, especially in the spring. People die of heart attacks. People are more likely to experience mental health issues. On Mondays there are more workplace injuries. There are issues in the “fall back” too even though this technically gives us back that “extra hour” we lost in the spring. 

I have a suggestion. Put the entire world on the same 24-hour clock and get used to night versus daylight hours being different in London and LA. Look at their website, a business is open 1000-1900 and you know they are open now at 18:00. You don’t have to go scrambling around to find out what local time in Dubai is compared to Seattle. Locally, I might go to bed at 0600 and wake at 0200. The terms midnight and noon would become archaic or perhaps applied locally, but business clocks would all read the same, no matter where they were. There would be no time zones. It would be the same time and the same day all around the world, and each new calendar date would begin all at once. 

How hard would that be to adjust to?

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fyi NaNo is going well. I passed 25k words today by aiming for at least two thousand words each day. The bad news is that I found the end of the piece; the good news is that I’ve been filling back in earlier in the story where I rushed through and skipped scenes.