At least 31 states and the District of Columbia restrict cell phones in schools
New York City teachers say the state’s recently implemented cell phone ban in schools has showed that numerous students no longer know how to tell time on an old-fashioned clock.
“That’s a major skill that they’re not used to at all,” Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, told Gothamist of what she’s noticed after the ban, which went into effect in September.
Students in the city’s school system are meant to learn basic time-telling skills in the first and second grade, according to officials, though it appears children have fallen out of practice doing so in an increasingly digital world.
If only there was a place they could learn that.
When I grew up we looked at the height of the pile in the hourglass and we liked it! The rich kids all had sundial wristwatches though.
I just noticed that I don’t have any analog clocks in my house. But I think I would like one.
There’s an interesting technology connections video on how analog clocks can be easier to parse how “far” through the hour/day you are with just a quick glance. Hand almost at the top means the hours almost up, for instance.
I have trouble with numbers (they didn’t have dyscalculia when I was a kid) and this was a chief complaint of mine, moving from elementary school to high school, where the clock were all digital. I had to “convert” it in my head to the clock face so my image-oriented brain could properly grasp it. Took me a few years to normalize it.
This thread hurts my soul… it’s not the actual subject but the quickness with which apparently everyone under 40 shrugs and says ‘fuck it’… if this is too much, I can only imagine how people treat subjects like informed voting.
Now you know how a clay tablet scribe felt when that new-fangled papyrus showed up in the high-schools.
You’re a funny bugger :)
I was going to reply to your hourglass and sundial joke with a reflection that hourglasses are so much older than the relatively recent development of sundials, but you clearly knew that so I didn’t. And then the one-two. You could have done cuneiform vs hieroglyphs but tablets vs papyrus is the better gag. Keep it up :)
Heh, I’m early Gen X bordering on boomer and as a kid I found it a lot harder to read the time on an analog clock as opposed to the Casio digital wristwatch I had.
Of course I could “decode” the clock, but it was not intuitive.
I am 20 and I still remember newspapers and TV talking about “teenagers these days can’t read clocks” since I can remember. it seems nobody has ever known
To give another data point for comparison, I am about as young a Millennials as one can be (I’m 29), and I don’t recall there being any issues in reading analog clocks in my cohort.
This is weirdly both surprising and not surprising to me. Not surprising because like I say, I am one of the last of the Millennials, and it does seem intuitive that this would be an issue that started with Gen Z. It’s surprising though, because 9 years seems like quite a small time window for such a change to have happened
I’m 59 and all the teenagers I knew could read clocks (both kinds) just fine, so I have no idea what you’re talking about.
You make it sound like you’re old 😂
Yeah I graduated high school in 2019 and some of my classmates had a hard time reading analog clocks, in private schools lmao. It’s definitely has increased with Covid and smart phones but kids who don’t want to learn never do.
And most kids, (and adults), never do want to learn.
Source: I’ve stood in front of a classroom trying to make math fun
‘Old clocks’? You mean… analog clocks? The ones in practically every household outside of America?
in practically every household outside of America?
Is this actually the case anymore?
And in! Lots of homes (edit: and other places!) have analog clocks here in the US. Historically, the US has had some really beautiful designs, too.
If they practiced teaching the way these students should have practiced telling time, this wouldn’t be surprising
It takes just a few minutes to learn how to read an analog clock. Once you’ve got the idea, you’ll be slow deciphering the time at first, but once you start doing it, very quickly you’ll be reading it immediately with just a glance.
I see analog clocks all over the place, especially waiting rooms and public buildings, and I have a very nice pretty one in my house. I think the people saying they’re not being used anymore just aren’t noticing them, they’re just background scenery to them and don’t enter their consciousness.
I learned how to read one over 20 years ago, when am I supposed to get to the point where it’s just a glance? (And it’s not like I rarely encountered analog clocks growing up, the only clock I could see during breakfast was an analog clock…)
I don’t mind them but for me digital is much faster to read. Granted it’s still like 2 seconds at most so not like it really matters, but I find it to be noticably more mental effort.
Every classroom I was in from kindergarten through university had analog clocks on the wall, so I was absolutely able to just glance. For years.
But since I haven’t been in a classroom for so long, and I’m not surrounded by analog clocks anymore, I think I’ve mostly lost that ability and I’ve found that it takes me a couple of seconds nowadays to decode it.
It’s definitely a skill that needs to be practiced to keep it up
Is there a letmegooglethatforyou for other search engines yet?
What a great time to learn!
It’s not that stunning, they didn’t grow up with them and you don’t really see them in public these days.
We explicitly learned analog clocks in 1st grade, had worksheets and everything. What the hell are schools doing these days?
People forget skills they don’t use. I’m guessing you and I had plenty of practice reading analog clocks over the years until the skill became completely ingrained.
Yeah, it reminds me of languages. I learned French to a pretty high level in high school (I was a try hard whose brain clicked well with languages), but over the last decade, I have rarely used those skills and I was recently shocked to realise how much my knowledge had atrophied. It’s easy to become complacent once you feel you have learned something, but you use it or you lose it.
Still not teaching about taxes… or anything useful, clearly.
Judging by the stories my mom has after teaching for decades they no longer really teach anything. Nor are they allowed to. These days they have to follow a script for everything down to how you move your hands and when.
Disruptive student? Just keep teaching like nothings going on.
Student struggling with a subject? Don’t stop to help or try a different method to help them learn. No child left behind so they’ll still move up a grade even if they can’t read or do simple addition.
Just make sure the students are in the classroom so the school gets money. Nothing else matters.
… Not doing that anymore? Because they’re very rare and you can easily get by without it most of the time
I work in schools. We have them in every hallway and classroom. But the kids do not know how to read them, and they don’t even seem interested to learn even though it would take all of two minutes to wrap their head around. Seen it in the middle and high schools.
30 yo and tbh not sure I really know how to read it right.
40-something and we grew up with the phrase “half past a monkey’s ass and a quarter to his balls” – gotta make learning fun!
Read to which number the short hand points to first. Then read the long hand by counting the number of black lines that run along the sides of the circle. Going from the number 12 to 1 has 5 black lines in between. 12 to 2 has 10 lines, 12 to 6 has 30 lines, 12 to 10 has 50 lines. Check the picture attached as an example.
As kid I knew how to read the clock, still I found it confusing and I needed to consciously put effort in it and I’d need to take some time concentrating.
At some point I decided to just ignore the minute hand, the hour hand alone is good enough for most uses and that helped.
Interestingly early clocks just had the hour hand, the minute hand was a later invention.
It takes me about one second to read the time on an analogue clock, and yes, some slight cognitive effort compared to a digital clock. The main thing is to get it into your head that every elapsed number from the top “12” position is five minutes. So, when the minute hand is pointed at the “2,” it means 10 minutes into the hour, 15 minutes when it’s pointed at the “3”, 30 minutes at the “6,” etc. once you’ve got that wired into your brain, reading the minutes becomes much easier, which is usually what slows people down in the beginning.
Yes, it’s very much possible to read time with just the hour hand as you currently as doing now. It’s a bit more difficult using smaller minutes however. My recommendation if you want be more comfortable with a two or three handed clock is to buy an analog wrist watch. Having it in practice daily cements it’s method eventually.
A lot easier version is just short hand = the hour, long hand * 5 = the minutes
And the we do 24 hour time and you need to add 12 to the long hand number…Because dozenal rocks!
The little (shorter) hand points to the hour, the big (longer) hand points to the minutes. That’s pretty much it. And of course the hands move clockwise.
edit: I should also note that for reading the hour, the number the hour hand points to is the number of the hour, but for reading the minutes, each number counts as 5 minutes. There are usually dots between the numbers–each dot is 1 minute. So between the 12 and the 1 is 5 minutes, 1 to 2 is 5 more minutes, so the minute hand pointing to the 2 means 10 minutes after the hour.
Also, the hour hand isn’t going to point directly to a number unless it’s the top of the hour
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I like thinking of the minutes in quarters and halves, “Its a quarter after 6pm” ≈ 1/4 * 60min is 15mins, so its 6:15pm. “Its 10 to seven” ≈ 60 - 10 is 50mins, so its 6:50. Idk unless its a timed activity I usually just round the clock to the higher number divisible by 5 “7:33” becomes “7:35”
It’s a bit scary that anything children were once expected to learn has now become “the calculator”. When calculators first came out the cry was ‘why do we need to learn to do math any more when this device can do it for us?’ Computers continued that trend. Smart phones even more so. It is a part of history that is hard to understand, how did a former, reasonably advanced civilization lose its advanced skills? We might be watching in real time how it happens. Except this time it is us, not an ancient civ.
Experienced software devs and tradesmen know this pain all too well. Frameworks and widgets make it easy to do stuff quickly, but no one knows how it works under the hood any more.
