So, schools aren’t even capable of teaching students how to read clocks anymore?
Schools have more important things to teach kids with the limited time they have
No, screw that whataboutism. When I went to school, I learned so much information that is virtually useless to most people, and not nearly enough skills and knowledge that would actually be helpful in daily life. I would like to see the situation improve for future generations.
Analogue clocks are everywhere and being able to read them is still important. Besides, if schools aren’t even capable of teaching something so simple to students, I think that calls into question their ability to teach far more complex things.
It’s because analog clocks are becoming obsolete. You can scream about the young peoples all you want but that’s the reality.
I’m not screaming about the young people; I was “the young people” not that long ago. Not everyone who criticizes education is an out of touch boomer resisting every societal change.
Actually, analogue clocks have been obsoleted in almost every way by digital clocks for at least half a century, as digital wristwatches first hit the market in the 1970s. And yet, analogue clocks are still found everywhere. Classes, stores, train stations, homes, offices, not to mention the majority of wristwatches, still mostly use analogue clocks. In fact, excluding screens, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people came across more analogue clocks than digital clocks on a daily basis. They’re technologically obsolete, but haven’t fallen out of use.
I have to have an analog clock within sight in the morning. When I first wake up I’m too tired and bleary eyed to think about numbers but I know what angle the minute hand will be at when I have leave to catch the bus to work. When you’re familiar with an analog clock it’s far more user friendly than looking at some numbers and have to do some math. Sure it’s simple math, but first thing in the morning, I’d rather just glance at the minute hand and when I see the angle I just know.
So I don’t think it’s not going away despite it being obsolete, it’s not going away because it’s more user friendly. Sure there’s a learning curve, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, it’s a more efficient way for a human to get a sense of time, which in many cases is more important than having a numerical representation of time.
Sorry I just assumed this was more boomer shitting on the youngins like usual so that’s my bad.
Perhaps the fact that we pay them like 30 grand a year is a factor? That’s how much my one bedroom apartment costs 😂 there’s no money left over for food or loans or electricity or gas
Financial stress has been proven to make you dumber
We also need to teach them how to write in cursive so they can read the declaration of independence.
How is that whataboutism?
It’s not that schools have become unable to teach kids to read analog clocks or kids have become unable to learn it. It’s not that they can’t it’s that they don’t
But speaking of whataboutism, your argument is literally “well what about all the useless stuff that I learned in school???”
How about they stop teaching useless stuff, and the first things they can throw out are cursive and analog clocks.
They are creating more and more idiots out there. The trend of “Help, our students don’t understand xyz, let’s stop teaching that immediately!” is disgusting. Maybe think of teaching it in a different way or just spending more time on that topic?
I don’t believe this for a second. You can literally just look at it and intuitively understand. Not to mention part of the standard elementary school curriculum is how to read a clock.
I’m a millenial and I can read analog clocks, but it takes me a few seconds, it’s not as instant as with digital ones.
I know, it’s just a meme, but… The article. It’s about clocks during exams specifically, when students are under pressure and more likely to misread the time on an analogue clock.
IMO all the more reason to keep them. In the real world we all have to perform under pressure. With practice they can learn to read the clock under pressure, maybe take a breath or two and slow down before trying to read it. It may be a simple hurdle to overcome but practicing overcoming these things is important for development.
You’re right it’s good to prepare young people for challenges. Still, that should mean challenges that would come up anyways, not artificially making things more difficult.
It’s good to know how to read an analog clock, just like it’s good to be able to read cursive. But both of them are outdated and aren’t inherently required in day to day life. Inserting them into a testing situation that’s meant to test something else is creating an unnecessary challenge.
There are tons of equipment and tools out there that very closely resemble an analog clock and require the same skills. Pressure gauges for example. These skills are not out dated.
Except, a pressure gage reads the number it’s pointing at. Not 1 hand means the number it’s pointing at and the other means 5 times the most recent digit passed plus 1 for each tick mark.
I’d wager that most people would never even see a pressure gage with two hands. Dual-indicating double-bourdon tube differential pressure gages are quite rare in the real world. Usually for that kind of application you’d go digital.
Not to mention the amount of analog clocks that are just wrong. I work at a fortune 500 company, most clocks are digital and synced to a time server. Every analog clock is wrong. Just yesterday I walked through the cafeteria and glanced at the clock and it read 5:20… For a second I panicked and was like it can’t be that late. I checked my phone, it was 3:06. The clock was just not set properly.
There are radio controlled clocks which theoretically shouldn’t be wrong. At least as long as there isn’t a battery or motor issue…
How do you tell whether you’re looking at a radio-controlled clock though?
Sometimes they have it written on the clockface. I don’t think that’s a general rule though.
In the same way there are digital clocks that can be wrong too though.
How would you tell you’re looking at a synchronized digital clock or cheap battery model?
You on the other perform excellent in being abrasive, despite social pressure not to be an asshole.
10/10 no notes.
Lol that dude was not being an asshole. Getting a little defensive?
Kids cant ask the teacher for the time?
At my school, because the clock was always between 2 and 10 minutes wrong, the students(mostly me) would just raise their hands and ask how much time they have left
they could ask the teacher, sure, but why not fix the problem instead of using a disruptive workaround until the end of time? phrased another way, should we as a society fix problems or provide half solutions that don’t fully resolve them?
I wrote the reply before reading the article so i didnt think of digital clocks being the alternative(i also never seen a digital clock in real life excluding smart devices)
Also, i was referencing the part of the comment that said that kids were misreading the time(do kids rely on analog clocks that may be wrong during tests?) , not saying that the problem shouldnt be fixed
Thanks for expounding upon that. It’s shit like this that gets spread around and older gens pat themselves on the back while shaking their head at the younger gen for not knowing something, despite it being taken out of context or even straight up false.
You’re right, but the article still has a shitty, clickbait-y headline.
To be honest, even if it were completely true… okay? If analogue clocks are on the way out then there’s no particular need for anyone to be able to read them any more. I like them a lot visually and have a couple in my home, but there’s nothing so special about them that people would be missing out by using digital clocks instead
Well, there sort of is https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag?si=eWRyU6pjV71_ag8N
With all due respect this is literally just a guy saying that he’s personally better at reading analogue clocks than digital ones for 18 minutes
I mean that’s kind of the point, right? They convey the information in a different way that’s easy to understand for some people which seems pretty relevant since conveying information is the only function of a clock. Probably the ideal solution would be to just have both in classrooms
I immediately thought of Technology connections based on that description. I didn’t even remember he did a video on clocks.
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Time’s an illusion anyways, might as well
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I heard they’re gonna remove schools because kids show up to them not knowing anything.
Florida is getting rid of all the books at least.
Sounds like divisive bullshit.
After all the millennial horseshit we had to hear in the 2010’s and we’re just gonna turn around and do the same shit, huh?
“Gen-z is killing the analog clock industry” news articles incoming
I’m not gonna do that, fuck that. I do hope this much screen time is ok for kids, even as a young programmer I didn’t have an iPad everywhere. Nobody seems concerned about their privacy, but guess what: neither did my millennial peers.
I think everything will be ok with alpha and Z. Let’s not repeat our the mistakes of our parents.
I think it’s important to not give certain things the benefit of the doubt. This clock stuff is just plain stupid to get bent out of shape about, but the other two are serious concerns.
This is just anecdotal, but I was a late 90’s kid that had as much screen time as I wanted growing up. I played an absurd amount of videogames, and had to be dragged outside by my siblings or I could comfortably stay indoors in front of a game or the internet for hours on end. I spent most of my early years (age 3 to age 15) in front of a screen. Yet, I did just fine in school, got a degree, and now work as a software engineer. I fell in love with my highschool sweetheart, and after waiting until I had my degree, we got married at 23, almost 10 years after we started dating. It felt like my obsessive amounts of screen time as a kid didn’t have any negative side effects to my life as a whole (outside of being a quiet and reserved person, and some could argue that that’s not a negative) and led me down a successful career path.
However, I don’t think kids these days have the luxury of doing that anymore. The content put in front of me as a kid was games made by teams that were passionate about the thing they were working on. Forums and early YouTube videos were created by some no name person with the hope of sharing something they openly cared about. Social Media didn’t exist yet and once it did, I never really got into it.
The content put in front of children these days is one of three or so things:
- Mindless dribble. (looking at you, Youtube Kids)
- Rushed, broken games made barely finished enough to get people to buy them just to make a quick buck, and the ones that are finished are so heavily tied into marketing it’s like the game is basically one big ad. (looking at you, Fortnite and Rocket League)
- Content made with the express purpose to either gain influencer status, or to use that influencer status to market something, primarily to children who are especially vulnerable to the scummy marketing practices they are using.
Obviously there are exceptions to these everywhere, but I’m talking about the things that are actively being shoved down kids’ throats. It’s not that I think that the content I consumed was better than what I see kids consuming now, but I think that the motivations behind the content can just as easily influence children as much as the content itself. I think that in a lot of ways, this kind of content is actively degrading kids’ brains, and from my experience, it’s not the screen time, it’s what’s being shown on screen that’s the issue.
Thankfully I’m tech savvy enough that I can make the internet for my children what it was for me as a kid, without all the marketing and money making schemes that pass as content these days, but a lot of people just toss a tablet in front of their kids and call it parenting.
I was going to rant about privacy as well, but this is getting way too long. Just know that I think digital privacy is really important, and think that we’ve paid the price for not considering it earlier, and there are ways we can save our kids from the same fate.
Sorry, I tend to write way too much on topics I care about, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
tl;dr - The clock thing is stupid, but please approach the constant exposure to the modern day internet and the digital privacy topics with a bit more scrutiny.
Yup, hating on the next generation is a tale as old as time. Idk why, but every generation seems to do it. Maybe it’s being uncomfortable with them being different or afraid of their youthfulness. I don’t get it.
Alternate title: Students cannot tell the time because schools are removing analog clocks from the classroom
When I worked data entry, there was a chart for cursive as people couldn’t understand cursive writing, and these were adults. I think this may check out (not because they’re lacking, but because they probably weren’t taught).
I know how to read and write in cursive but there are still a lot of people whose handwriting I can’t read because it’s so sloppy and idiosyncratic. A chart wouldn’t help me.
I learned cursive but I’m sure have forgotten how to write it, especially some of the capital letters. Thing is learning it now is really just for backwards compatibility. Yes, it’s faster to write in cursive when writing by hand, but how often is that coming up these days, for most people?
Not often I think, unless you read a lot of historical documents/letters. But even a lot of those are transcribed these days. So likely only people working with doctors (and even then, probably just specific medications). Outside of the data entry job, I don’t think it’s come up in my life outside of school.
If I don’t have access to a keyboard something has gone catastrophically wrong (I work in IT)
Yeah I am way out of practice in my cursive. I can still read it but it wouldn’t come naturally. Cursive was pounded into my head at a young age. Teachers saying we would used it every day in our lives. That was probably true for them but it was certainly not true for me.
The only time I ever use cursive is signing my name. The only time I read cursive is a letter from my grandparents once they pass that would basically be the end of my cursive reading.
Yeah but people’s cursive is more inconsistent than print. It can be super bad and print is more practical. You could say it’s Same with a digital clock but an analog clock is always the same with circle and 2 hands while I don’t know what characters people are trying to do with cursive.
1 if u dont kids how to do a thing they dont learn
2 and more importantly; finally, analog clocks have no place in our wold and every last one should be in trash they serve literally no purpose, i have always hated them and i will delight in their death.
What if I want to know the time?
digital clocks will rule the world our time will come ur children’s children wont even say clockwise and anti clockwise cuz they wont know what those are
I am curious how else we would describe the direction of circular motion
This would be gen alpha at this point no?
If only there was a building children could attend where they do things like teach how clocks work
Seriously! I’m pretty sure that was part of 1st or 2nd grade. Maybe both…
The problem is unless you really use the skill a lot you’re not really gonna learn it from school. I had to teach myself how to read analog clocks in highschool cause even though I’m pretty sure I learned it in elementary school I grew up with computers and eventually smart phones so I never had to use it.
Edit: Also for context I was born in 2001
We had one in every classroom. So we only had to look at it for reinforcement of the original lesson.
We had them too but at least for me in elementary school I didn’t really care what time it was. I remember I knew what position on the clock meant school was done but other then that didn’t really need to read it cause the teachers would just bring us as a class to whatever our next class was for that day. By the time I got old enough to start caring smartphones were prevalent enough that I never really needed to learn how to read a clock. It wasn’t until highschool where teachers got more strict about enforcing no phones out in class that I then learned how to read clocks so I could know when class would be done.
In my elementary school we even had clocks, where the numbers were large dice the teacher could take out and rotate so they showed ½, 30 or 18 instead of 6, for example. It’s not hard to learn, if you’re at a school. But then again, digital clocks are so everpresent that it might not actually matter…
Gather round, children, time to learn how to use a dial up modem, and after that we’ll go over Morse code.
Did you not learn morse code in school…? I’m rather young and that was taught in one of my classes I’m fairly certain. Even if it was mainly for fun, and only really remembered how to do SoS
We learned analogue clocks in children’s TV also
I’ve worked in 2 different schools in the IT department and 4 others as a volunteer lecturer (I got a name tag that said Technology Evangelist) I found that putting an analog clock in the screen saved of computers in the classroom was more likely to result in the clock actually being on time.
Too many clocks in classrooms are very old or even battery powered but neglected.
I don’t think kids are dumb just they aren’t getting a world that is properly maintained by competent people that care about their work and are adequately resourced to do the whole job.
Well, in Germany… depending on the school and people, we cared a lot for those clocks and maintained them well
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Real talk, is there some benefit to an analog clock that would prevent them from all being replaced by digital ones? Being able to know exactly the time in a moment’s glance seems better to me.
They’re certainly not better looking than a digital one, considering most of the ones used in schools are just the cheapest and most basic version they can get.
Power requirements maybe? Longevity?
It proves to be somewhat useful as an example when trying to teach fractions and decimals, something we are absolutely terrible at teaching. Incomprehension of fraction to decimal conversion is why 90% of people who say they are bad at math, say they are bad at math.
Teaching someone how to read a clock for the sole purpose of using it as a math example seems like a poor use of effort.
I wouldn’t say that’s the sole purpose, just an additional purpose to being able to tell time. It’s also useful if the kid wants to be a pilot.
So what are the purposes? Nobody uses analog clocks anymore so afaict:
- To teach fractions
- Something to do with being a pilot???
What am I missing? 😛
Clockwise, counter clockwise. Classic time shorthand (IE, half past ten, quarter to eleven). Time estimations (easy to see a half minute on a analog clock, digital just goes from 2:00 to 2:01)
I think analog clock displays are more elegant, and are overall nicer than digital. Personal preference though.
Incomprehension of fraction to decimal conversion is why 90% of people who say they are bad at math, say they are bad at math
I feel called out. I was in high-school Calculus (11th grade) before I “truly” understood fractions. Like, I honestly somehow managed to make it to Calculus without knowing how to add and subtract fractions without a calculator. Thought I was dumb in math until 9th grade algebra, and didn’t start becoming a bit of a math nerd until Calculus
Being able to know exactly the time in a moment’s glance seems better to me.
That seems more like a pro for analogue to me. It’s much easier with an analogue clock since you get a visual presentation of time. Whenever someone tells me a time, I have to first imagine an analogue clock to understand what that time means.
Honestly that’s just about being used to one versus the other. For me it’s basically the other way around
It helps give people a geometrical understanding of the cyclic nature of time.
Lol I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think those words work the way you used them anyway
Sounds like you just didn’t understand. Each hour of the 12 on the clock takes up 30° of the circle, and we measure time in cycles of hours, minutes, seconds that all match up well with the 360° of a circle.
Cutting pizza would also teach kids a geometrical understanding of how circles work, I don’t see how that translates at all to being innate to reading a clock. I know tons of people who can read a clock who suck at math. It seems like an incredibly weak assertion.
Making any excuse to not learn how analog clocks work is what’s really a weak assertion. It’s not that fucking hard.
They convey time instantly, without reading. You don’t even need the numbers for them to work. It’s like showing a progress bar versus just giving the percentage as a number.
I prefer analogue clocks because I tend to have time blindness with ADHD, and it’s easier to see at a glance how much time is visually left in an hour or how much time is passing with an analogue clock. Just knowing that “15 min left” isn’t really as effective as being able to see a visual representation of “15 min left”, for example.
Genuine question, how precise do you need the time to be? Maybe you actually need precise readings for something. I figured that “on the 5 min marker”, “slightly before/behind the 5 min marker” and “in the middle of two 5 min markers” is precise enough for me. And I I see a hand at these positions faster than reading numbers.
I think for precise readings (eg. entering the time I start working), the speed is the same for me, but obviously I didn’t test this.
I also think looking at the time but then still not knowing what time it is happens less on an analog clock.
I don’t know how much personal preference influences this though.
Can’t do that with a digital display, can you?
It literally says on the image you sent how to do it with a digital display (besides, it’s pretty reasonable)
Not if you can’t imagine analogue clock.
Their method is “imagine a clock face showing that hour” how are you going to do that if you don’t know how analogue clocks work?
You can use them as a crude compass next time you find yourself unexpectedly in the wilderness.
An analog clock is just three sets of loading bars with their ends glued together. You can tell geometrically what proportion of each division of time (day, hour, and minute) are spent and what proportion remains. You don’t even need the numbers.
If you need stopwatch-level precision, sure, a digital display is superior. But how often do you need that? Most of what I need clocks for is, “Oh, it’s about a quarter to noon, I have a lunch appointment to get to”.
It is my personal preference to visually intuit that the clock hands are roughly separating the hour into 3/4 spent and 1/4 remaining and use that to know how much time I have left to the hour, rather than read the symbols “42” on the display and manually do the mental gymnastics of “well that’s basically 45, which is three quarters of the way to 60 minutes”.
I’ll admit this benefit is marginal.
I think that’s an interesting way to look at it. I find it easier to do the mental gymnastics, as you call it.
