Opinion: Later School Start? Let's Not Sleepwalk Into Disaster (original editorial written for this worksheet; the writer is fictional)

(1) The school board's proposal to move the start of the school day from 8:30 am to 9:30 am is being sold as a gift to tired teenagers. It is nothing of the kind.

(2) Supporters of the change apparently believe that young people should be allowed to drift into class whenever they feel like it, as if school were a café that opens when its customers finally wake up.

(3) Let us be clear about the choice in front of us. Either we keep the bell exactly where it is, or we raise a generation that cannot get out of bed without permission.

(4) And where would it end? If the bell moves an hour this year, next year it will move two. Then lessons will become optional, and before long students will be choosing their own marks.

(5) I put the question to a celebrated television chef, a man who has run busy kitchens for thirty years, and he was in no doubt: early starts build character. If anyone understands discipline, it is him.

(6) My own nephew tried sleeping in during his final year of school, and his marks dropped. Teenagers clearly do worse, not better, when they are given more time in bed.

(7) There is also a practical question the board has not answered. The same buses that carry secondary students also run the routes for the district's junior schools, so a later start could mean rebuilding both timetables, at a cost the board has not yet published.

(8) Keep the bell at 8:30. Our children's futures depend on it.

Key terms. Straw man: misrepresenting an opponent's view as weaker or sillier than it is, then attacking that version. False dilemma: presenting only two options when others exist. Slippery slope: claiming one step will inevitably lead to a chain of extreme consequences, without showing why. Appeal to authority (irrelevant authority): relying on someone's status rather than evidence, especially when their expertise is in a different field. Hasty generalization: drawing a broad conclusion from too few or unrepresentative examples.