End of daylight saving turns back time
November 1, 2019
It’s time to fall back as students, teachers, and millions of Americans across the nation will move clocks back an hour early Sunday morning at 2 a.m. as daylight saving time ends.
“I like getting more sleep, but it also messes me up because I’m late for like a week and a half,” senior Chase Moore said. “I want to get more sleep this week but I’m probably still going to be up.”
Contrary to a commonly accepted misconception, Benjamin Franklin was not responsible for widespread biannual clock confusion.
“After being unpleasantly stirred from sleep at 6 a.m. by the summer sun, the founding father penned a satirical essay in which he calculated that Parisians, simply by waking up at dawn, could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million through ‘the economy of using sunshine instead of candles,” wrote Christopher Klein for history.com. “As a result of this essay, Franklin is often erroneously given the honor of ‘inventing’ daylight saving time, but he only proposed a change in sleep schedules—not the time itself.”
In reality, daylight saving time has been primarily about saving energy.
Germany is the country that first started using daylight saving time on a regular basis. They did so in 1916 to take advantage of the daylight to save coal during World War I.
In the United States, it became a national standard in 1966 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act as a way to conserve energy.
However, state Sen. Jose Menendez from San Antonio thinks the notion of saving energy by adjusting the clocks twice a year is outdated.
“I just think in 2019, as a country, we don’t need to be ‘springing forward’ and ‘falling back’ just because we did it in World War I to save energy,” Menendez said in the Fort Worth Star Telegram. “We just need to pick a time and stick with it.
An extra hour of sleep is appreciated by many students, but sophomore Katie Stone dislikes the change for a different reason.
“I don’t really like daylight saving time,” Stone said. “It gets dark at 5 o’clock at night so then I am really tired during the day.