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.
I’ve been hearing this since I was a kid, though back then they just blamed the use of digital clocks instead of phones.
Elder millennial here, I also struggle reading analogue clocks to this day. I can, but it just takes me a long time to do so. And I’ve been like this since I was a little kid.
If only there was a place they could learn that.
“Numerous students”
Gotta love that completely nebulous and undefined number. It also sounds like a non-zero number simply have to be instructed to read the clock in order to understand it. Could be like 20 kids out of a school of 400. Oh noes the education system has completely failed!
Some might call this a "teachable moment ", no?
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.
It helped that every school in the district ran analog clocks exclusively, so you had to learn it if you wanted to know what time it was at school.
Yup. I learned cursive in the 2nd or 3rd grade. Probably the last time I used it as well. If I needed to write something in cursive, I would be pretty screwed. I remember some of the easier stuff, like the vowels. But if I needed to write a “q” or “k” I don’t think I could remember it.
With that said, learning how to read an analog clock is way easier. It’s a formula/method, and the numbers are right there. It’s not memorization. This should be something easy to teach.
The problem is that analog clocks are not in the curriculum for middle school and high school. It’s hard to find time to teach middle schoolers how to read clocks when you are struggling through “To Kill a Mockingbird” with a bunch of students on a 4th grade reading level.
Teenagers in inner city schools not knowing how to read analog clocks is a much more complicated issue than it seems on the surface. The solution is not “well they should have just had the childhood that I had and it wouldn’t be a problem”
Still not teaching about taxes… or anything useful, clearly.
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.
‘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?
“Old clocks”?
Those are just clocks
Good thing they are in that place where all the professional teacher are.
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 was frustrated that I couldn’t quickly and accurately read the time - Ie: it’s 1:23 rn, if I was looking at an analog clock, depending on the activity, I’d round either up or down. I found the minutes too small to read, and 90% of the time rounding was good enough.
It literally is a harder format. One is literally just numbers and another is a chart. Anyone can read text but everyone needs to learn how to read a chart at least once.
I met my first kid who couldn’t tell time almost 10 years ago.
Teachers are just figuring this out now?
The poor sods probably think time is quantized. But that’s philosophically impossible, because that means time is like frames in a movie, but if time consist of a series of still frames, how do we get from one point in time to the next, and how do particles remember their direction or frequency?
Ergo time must be linear, but that too is philosophically impossible, because that creates problems with infinities. Meaning the theory of time must be incomplete as infinity is considered to be outside the valid range of a physics theory.
So time can be neither quantized or linear, but what other options are there?
I’ll just have to acknowledge that just as Socrates realized, all I know is that I know nothing. I’m just very very confused, just like those students are over an old analogue clock.
I love this take because it’s the kind of thing only a handful of teenagers would ever think about, let alone understand, yet it speaks to an effect that underlies them all.
It’s the kind of thing I’d say and people would go, “You’re overthinking it.” No, no if anything, you’re underthinking it. Just because the idea doesn’t occur to someone else doesn’t mean it’s not a valid extension of the thought. So it is here, with a train of thought that deviates from expectation, but that leaves one pondering nonetheless.
Time is a funny thing. If current theory holds through, it means that a photon traveling at the speed of light experiences everything in the same instant. It makes looking up at ancient stars feel all the more incredible, thinking that the photon that hits your retina already “experienced” that moment when it was first emitted millions of years ago.
thinking that the photon that hits your retina already “experienced” that moment when it was first emitted millions of years ago.
I never thought of it that way, but yes that must be the logical conclusion. Time is indeed a funny thing, but when I think of it as causality, it kind of makes sense.
LOL, why are they stunned to learn this?
Stunned, I tell you!
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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!?
30 yo and tbh not sure I really know how to read it right.
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I never heard that one, but in my family if we weren’t wearing a wristwatch and someone asked the time, we’d look at our wrist and say, “It’s two hairs past the freckle.” :) Those were the days.
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.
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”
