Community colleges are offering midnight classes to meet rising demand, reports NPR. At Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, Paul Vinette teaches Introduction to Psychology from midnight to 3 a.m once a week. Ten students take the course.
“I’m young. I’m always up at this hour anyway, either playing video games or doing work or working on something. It’s just an hour [when] my mind’s not resting, which is what most people are doing,” (Kory) Fox-Ponting says.
Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and several Midwestern schools pioneered midnight and 5 a.m. courses.
To keep his students alert, Vinette uses everything from sound effects to a buffet with coffee and snacks. The class gets a 15-minute break, although he says most students do not need it.
“It was the complete opposite of what I feared,” Vinette says, “which was going to be trying to drag a dozen students as if they were dead bodies through the mud at 1 in the morning. And it’s quite the opposite. No one’s tired. No one’s sleepy. I got a bunch of night owls in here.”
While Ashley Beck, 25, takes night classes, her husband is home with their two children. “There’s not a lot of kids in the class, so the teacher-to-student ratio is a lot better,” Beck says.
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