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.
Exactly. I’m wondering how many of those teachers could use a slide rule or even an abacus. We’re far enough along now that I bet the majority of teachers would also be lost when confronted with a log table or a topo map and a compass.
Astrolabe and sextant? They’d be totally lost.
I bet most teachers don’t know how to saddle a horse, card and spin wool and flax by hand, or even use a clutch on a manual transmission vehicle, either.
[edit] Ooh… thought of another one! I bet none of the children know how to use a rotary phone either. (In fact, since POTS has been fully DTMF for over 20 years, I doubt a dial phone would actually function today without a converter).
And yet, we still have analog clocks all around us. Seems to me we should know his to use them… Unlike a sextant.
Still, knowing what those things are and how they work just might be useful if something similar becomes important for some reason.
Those things should be known by at least enough of the population to bring them back and use them if everything goes apocalyptic.
If things start falling apart, I’m throwing in with the Amish.
Learning to read analogue clocks also helps provide some foundational learning for circular geometry - being able to quickly identify relevant segments of a circle and their respective fractions (5 minutes = 1/12 = 30° = π/6 rad etc.) helps build towards being able to compute circular geometric problems more easily in later years.
Its good to know how to grow a turnip as a fallback skill.
And raise a barn
Turnips more or less grow themselves, but raising a barn without modern cordless tools and truss plates requires a lot of the skills we should be lamenting the loss of. Hand saws, hand planes, handmade nails (that are expensive), hand sharpening and sanding… there’s more to building a barn than growing a field of turnips is all I’m sayin.
Indeed, and even the turnips require soil that helps them grow. The Amish are experts at land management without chemicals. We take such poor care of our land that most nonprofessional farming will take years of land work just to get a useful yield.
I remember we were taught a segment on how to use an abacus and how they worked, because it demonstrated certain mathematical principles. Of course I don’t remember now how to use one, but I’m sure that visual demonstration of the mathematical concepts helped us as we were learning math. In the same way, learning about analog clocks at a young age would probably help with learning about geometry/trigonometry, angles and degrees, arcs, etc.