End of daylight saving turns back time
Daylight saving time will end this Sunday, Nov. 3. Time will fall back one hour at 2:00 a.m., becoming 1:00 a.m.
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 Jose Menendez from San Antonio thinks the notion of saving energy by adjusting the clocks twice a year is outdated.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.
