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.
Some might call this a "teachable moment ", no?
Exactly my thought. Not only are you getting the opportunity to teach a skill that had not previously been taught, but you are also able to help kids better understand the concept of time and why we use certain words to define time. Win win.
It’s wild to think that, “It’s a quarter to 8,” must be a mental exercise for some people. That is, instead of having an immediate understanding from being able to glance at an analog clock and think, “That’s clearly 1/4 of an hour,” it instead relies on a cognitive exercise that requires a knowledge of division and subtraction (60 divided by 4, then subtract the result from 60.)
Though I tend to think of time spatially, in part due to being raised with analog clocks. They’re much easier for me to read and understand at a glance without having to process much. Reading a digital clock requires converting it to analog in my mind, because the spatial appearance of the hands is what my brain makes sense of. I sometimes hear from people who can’t do that though, who instead have to convert the analog to digital in their minds. Which is fine, it just sounds much more “mathy” to me and like it takes more work than making sense of shapes. But to each their own.
‘Old clocks’? You mean… analog clocks? The ones in practically every household outside of America?
where can I get one of those Anal OG clocks?
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.
My mom has a thing for clocks. There are some places in her house where you can see 5 clocks, not counting watches or smartphones. No, I don’t need a clock in the bathroom, yet there it is. Granted, some of those are digital clocks, but some are also analog with Roman numerals.
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
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.
Only in murica 🕠
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
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.
How do you not read it at a glance? After 20 years you think you would just notice the general shapes, its all basically the same, especially if you simply round everything, which is what a lot of people do as time on an analog clock is rarely used super precise.
1/4 or 1/2 after or before, and almost.
Then what hour is the small hand approaching?
Quarter to 3.
Half past 1.
Almost 4.
Seems pretty simple. Unless you are used to 24 hours, then you would have to ignore or add 12.
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
I think the people saying they’re not being used anymore just aren’t noticing them
Probably too busy getting shrimp neck and not looking up, LOL.
Hehe, I remember when my paternal grandparents used an old wall clock to teach me and my sister how to read it.
It took a few hours, then we understood what it said, over time we learned what it actually meant.
I finally had my “aha” moment when someone demonstrated how to use an analogue clock to find north. And the neat thing is, if you already know where north is, you can use the clock to find a rough lat/long too (longitude by number of minutes away from the nearest zone border, latitude by calculating the real difference between north and clock north based on time of year). Of course, this only works with a proper swiss watch; the ones that don’t have a smooth action but tick between demarcated points spend most of their time being wrong.
Yeah, same principle as a sundial, but using known time to find north instead of known north to find the time.
Personally I find it pretty easy to achieve the same thing just by judging the height of the sun.
It’s a skill that increasingly is becoming less and less relevant. What even is the reason to still have analogue clocks?
Digital clocks have way less time drift too so they require less manual adjusting. It’s still a good idea to know it though, we have way too many analogue clocks out in the world and some of them have beautiful aesthetics.
I like analog clocks because they’re usually more decorative than digital clocks. If I’m going to hang a clock in a room (and I will, because I hate not knowing what time it is) then chances are high that I’ll get some cool artsy analog.
i hate this shit, ofc they don’t know, who was planning to teach them? certainly not the fucking schools imposing this shit.
Next they’ll be surprised to find that they don’t know long division, cursive writing or 6502 assembly language
6502 assembly language
Z80 would be good too. The kids should be able to implement the instruction set on a breadboard by intuition alone. There’s something wrong with the teachers and Big School if the kids don’t have it running CP/M by the end of the school year, preferably with a working port of Hack.
These schools don’t even teach kids base-8 math. Disgusting.
Tbh I think teaching 6502 assembly would be a great idea. You can learn the basics of how computers work without having to deal with all the complexity of a computer from 2026.
It’s better to use an AVR for that. 6502 was a ridiculous kludge for the sake of slightly improved code density.
What is AVR?
8 bit MCU series popularized by the Arduino a decade or two ago. Kind of obsolete now but still has some uses and attractions.
Is there a such thing as an intentionally simplified assembly language, perhaps one that targets a VM, for ease of development and learning purposes? Like the assembly equivalent of Lua, I guess.
Youth of today are a failure. They neither show the initiative to adopt new and improved practices the way we broke from those of our parents’ generation, nor the wisdom to recognize that our generation’s ways are the correct ones and should be followed to the letter.
You have to be paying attention to this one. An /s would have been a good idea.
Youth of today are some of the most forward thinking empathetic no nonsense people around.
I love the younger generations, their compassion and humanity is leagues ahead of their predecessors.
Anyone who shits on them is a failure.
Yeah, I share your view. I wish that the youth of today could have grown up in a better world than I did, but unfortunately for most, that’s not the case. Sure, there are some things that are better, but by and large, young people are facing so much hard stuff. In spite of that (and perhaps even because of that), I have seen so many of them who are deeply caring and engaged in politics.
I worry about some things but I do like the activism I’m seeing
Don’t mind the people who can’t get a joke, I thought this was funny.
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.
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.
This is so silly. Kids can’t read an analog clock? Teach them. This isn’t personal finance or cursive writing, you can teach them to read a clock in an afternoon.
Kids today are too stupid to intuit things their parents had to be shown. Shocking.
They still teach analog clocks in kindergarten or 1st grade. All my kids learned.
So happy to hear this. I thought maybe I was just ancient…
Possibly the case here as well. I learned roman numerals in school enough to pass whatever was on tests, but everything past 18 is a mystery to me now; probably because there isn’t a final fantasy 20 or whatever yet.
Unless it’s deeply internalized, knowledge atrophies from disuse.
Possibly the case here as well. I learned roman numerals in school enough to pass whatever was on tests
Note that there are multiple systems of writing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals
While subtractive notation for 4, 40, and 400 (IV, XL, and CD) has been the usual form since Roman times [citation needed], additive notation to represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX, and CCCC)[9] very frequently continued to be used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII),[10] 74 (LXXIIII),[11] and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9, 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX,[13] and DCCCC[14]) have also been used, although less often.
The two conventions could be mixed in the same document or inscription, even in the same numeral. For example, on the numbered gates to the Colosseum, IIII is systematically used instead of IV, but subtractive notation is used for XL; consequently, gate 44 is labelled XLIIII.[15][16]
Especially on tombstones and other funerary inscriptions, 5 and 50 have been occasionally written IIIII and XXXXX instead of V and L, and there are instances such as IIIIII and XXXXXX rather than VI or LX.[17][18]
Modern clock faces that use Roman numerals still very often use IIII for four o’clock but IX for nine o’clock, a practice that goes back to very early clocks such as the Wells Cathedral clock of the late 14th century.[19][20][21] However, this is far from universal: for example, the clock on the Palace of Westminster tower (commonly known as Big Ben) uses a subtractive IV for 4 o’clock.[20][c]
IIII for four o’clock but IX for nine o’clock
Very interesting - I have a newer Timex with RN on my (left) wrist right now and never thought about alternate notations for the numbers. Turns out it uses “IIII” for 4 but “IX” for 9 rather than spelling it all out in additive form. The designers made a curious choice for people wearing the watch on their left - the 9 o’clock “IX” is upside down so that it reads “XI” from the point of view of the wearer rather than, thus it looks like 9 is 11.
We had to learn RN when I was a kid, and I assume that’s only because there were a few RN clocks remaining out in the world. I’ve never felt like I need to process the numerals on a clock anyway - once you know what position corresponds to what hour you’re good to go. Many clocks and watches don’t have numerals at all and that doesn’t impair most people from using them.
I remember seeing a clock with roman numerals at a beach house as a little kid and thinking it was a clock for ghosts or skeletons.
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When I was a kid, we had whole educational units on this. Like with a special demonstration clock and worksheets and everything.
How are kids supposed to learn if schools don’t teach them?
All these kids are gonna fail their dementia tests in 60 years. 😝
(Yes that’s how it long it takes psychologists to update stuff, they still give out psych testers from the 1940s for stuff like custody evaluations)
“analog” <> “old-fashioned”. Analog clocks are very common out in the world. Analog watches even more so, they’re the norm not the exception among people with an interest in watches. My take-away from this story is that 1) these schools are not teaching kids to read analog clocks, and 2) these schools have installed digital clocks rather than analog.
Both of these things are easy to remedy.
Also a lot of the clocks are broken but we still blame phones even after we banned them
Google “what is a scapegoat”
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Analog clocks are not “common” out in the world. Not where these kids are.
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people with an interest in watches are a small percentage of people with watches. And most are “boomers” who don’t actually have an interest in watches beyond as a status symbol.
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I think every school I’ve ever been in had an analog clock in every room, but:
- The “learning time” unit comes and goes in grade 1/2, and teachers might drop the practice shortly thereafter (while teachers of other grades abdicate responsibility)
- Students eventually go home, where there may be no analog clocks.
- Seeing clocks in public is also becoming rare, and it’s not uncommon to see a once-working historical time-piece become neglected and no longer working
Another interesting thing, at least around me, is that audible “time-striking” on the hour seems like it might outlast all the large public clocks. I believe the vast majority of them are now digitally operated and emitted over a loudspeaker instead of being a mechanical system hooked up to an analogue clock with actual bells. It kind of makes sense, because that can be automated and requires far less maintenance and resources than a mechanical system or human bellringer.
Seeing clocks in public is also becoming rare
Is it? I hadn’t noticed but I’m probably not looking for clocks in the wild much either. I can think of one big quasi-public space (my YMCA gym) that has nothing but analog clocks up high on the walls. I could speculate that analog is easier than digital to read from a distance, or that large digital clocks designed to be read from a distance are more expensive than analog or hard to find, but I wouldn’t think either of these would be true.
There are wall clocks all over my life too, and especially at the swimming pool and the ski hill it is way easier to have an analog clock than a huge bright wall clock. (The pool has those too, but for pace clocks not for the time of day.)
they’re the norm not the exception among people with an interest in watches.
Watches stopped being interesting to anyone except watch nerds by the 1980s or so, when they all became electronic except for very niche mechanical ones.
Also camp counselors.
Why are you stunned? Most kids today are raising themselves. If it’s not a skill you teach in school, it’s not like they are learning it somewhere else.
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Ick. Voting? Do I have to go wake up the dude that takes the cover off of my dad’s Rivian?
Also. Where’s my free house!?
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 :)
Recent evidence shows they were used side by side for a while.
I can only imagine how people treat subjects like informed voting.
No need to imagine, look at the people elected to run the United States.
That’s how people treat subjects like informed voting.
And look at the competition. You get what you ran against
