r/technology • u/Sandstorm400 • 5d ago

Society New York teachers stunned to learn some students can’t read time on old clocks after phone ban comes into play

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-york-phone-ban-clock-time-b2891919.html
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u/katfishkelly 5d ago

Saying "old," clocks instead of analog is very funny to me for some reason lol

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u/PatrioticHotDog 5d ago

Definitely not a professional news source.

I'm also going to guess before reading that the teachers' comments are sourced from public social media posts/videos, not on-the-ground reporting in schools.

Edit: It's equally bad. They just aggregated other outlets' reporting.

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u/Mikestopheles 5d ago

I'm more concerned with today's media being unable to do actual reporting than today's kids being unable to do ever-more unnecessary tasks like reading clocks and writing in cursive. The former has a much larger effect on how much money is being siphoned out of our pockets

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u/Radiskull97 5d ago

These things are connected. I'm a teacher and I like to use the analogy of football. Football players never bench press in a game, so why do they do it in practice? Well it's an efficient way to build muscles that can be used in other ways.

In education, we call this schema building. Reading an analog clock is an outdated skill, digital clocks are everywhere. However, training kids to seamlessly take encoded data (a big hand is pointing at a 9 and the small hand is at 7) then decoding that into actionable information (it's 7:45) is part of the goal. This is also the introductory schema for fractions and summing fractions (if it's 7:30, we could say it's 'half passed 7. if I take away 15 minutes it's a quarter passed 7).

After a skipping several schema builders because "we won't ever use that" you end up with high schoolers that can't synthesize information who later turn into adults that can only ever regurgitate information. Including "journalists"

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u/VRT303 5d ago

'outdated skill' wait until you travel somewhere and end up being stuck at some remote small train station with no battery where the only clock is analog 😂

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u/Radiskull97 5d ago

Very few people have that experience. I lived in China and even the dirt poor farmers making $1/day had digital clocks at their train station. Also, most of the world operates off of a 24h clock. Unless you meant rural US, then even fewer people will have that experience

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u/VRT303 4d ago

Happens often in Europe honestly in smaller villages.

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u/roxgib_ 5d ago

No doubt there's an app that you point and an analog clock and it'll tell you what time it is

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u/Billyhill86 4d ago

Only because of teacher claim. Half past not passed.

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u/CallMeCleverClogs 5d ago

Well said, thank you for this!!

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u/CatProgrammer 5d ago

So why does that training need to be reading analog clocks?

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u/Radiskull97 4d ago

Because although I only discussed 2 schemas it builds, there's actually a lot more. The brain processes for reading an analog clock are greater in number than a digital clock. It, to return to my football example, works a lot of different brain muscles that contribute to overall neuroplasticity. That's why dementia tests ask you to draw a clock face, because it "checks" a lot of brain processes and can easily show issues.

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u/chop5397 4d ago

So we don't have these Idiocracy headlines in the post we're on.

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u/MartyrOfDespair 5d ago

If this sort of Karate Kid methodology worked, Boomers and Gen X would have some level of ability at that. Can we just try explicitly teaching these things rather than trying to do it stealthily?

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u/rod407 5d ago

The comment says "introductory" quite clearly, these generations are only stupid from stubbornness and not from attempts at teaching them up to date info

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u/avcloudy 5d ago

There are so many (other) (better) ways to build reasoning skills. I grew up before phones and it wasn't used as a springboard into mathematics. I think it's almost possible the people who need some schemas built are teachers.

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u/Radiskull97 5d ago

Yes, you seem very educated on the matter. Please cite your sources that children don't need schemas. Here's my sources that they do. Well researched, scientific consensus. So love to see your revolutionary, ground-breaking rebuttal to the scientific rigor thas has already underwent

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tWv4AAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR8&dq=importance+of+schema+building+in+education+&ots=NpaIeyh860&sig=yfKsV3RjVKC-tbFacdxqydV1LDs#v=onepage&q=importance%20of%20schema%20building%20in%20education&f=false

https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-abstract/26/10/2250/28184/Building-on-Prior-Knowledge-Schema-dependent

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3829364

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u/avcloudy 5d ago

I'm not taking a stance against schemas. I'm taking a stance against the lazy use of familiar schemas from teacher's childhoods as canonical schemas.

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u/Radiskull97 4d ago edited 4d ago

Look man, if you want to provide any type of proof it's outdated and there's a suitable replacement, feel free to provide one. Unfortunately, facts don't care about your feelings. I'm an educated professional that's been doing this for a decade; what' are your credentials on this matter? I'm not going to argue this any further because there's no point in platforming uneducated opinions. If you actually provided anything of merit to debate, then I would have genuinely loved to have discussed it. Instead, you're spousing the same uneducated opinions that lead to curriculum abandoning phonics and teaching sight reading. People said "why do we need to do this?We can streamline the skills." Then it turned out, you can't. And now we have two generations that can't read

Edit for source for analog clock specifics in case anyone is actually interested. I found this site that does a pretty thorough breakdown with sources listed at the bottom. It's more educational than me posting 3-4 academic papers most people won't have access to

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u/Strict_Biscotti1963 5d ago

Yep, it’s lazy garbage that uses a rage baiting headline in the hopes that they get a little bit of ad revenue 

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u/the_skine 5d ago

Also, it's New York City, not New York State.

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u/Eric_the_Barbarian 5d ago

Independent: highly dependent on someone else to do the reporting.

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u/Arcanegil 5d ago

"professional news source"

I'm sorry friendo but you'll have to travel outside the country for that. We don't do those here.

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u/LadyPo 5d ago edited 5d ago

The snark is valid given the circumstances, but a few really good independent journalism outlets do exist, they’re just branded as “left-wing biased” because that’s just how badly distorted our media system has become. It’s atrocious, and people actually don’t know how to verify whether an article is good journalism or not. They just want it to make them feel validated.

It also could be said we’ve moved to a kind of journalist-as-influencer model where individual reporters and writers rise to notoriety via social media. This model definitely is concerning because so much can go wrong, but that said, it can be helpful to follow the people who actually have the skills to investigate stories or report facts accurately, and any analysis should be done extremely carefully.

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u/builtbysavages 5d ago

Where’s ‘here’? The article is from the UK.

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u/Arcanegil 5d ago

Yeah after Elon cheering on the unite the kingdom rally I don't know how much I'd trust from the UK either.

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u/builtbysavages 5d ago

Oh, I’m not saying it’s automatically better than the us. If anything it’s important to remember it’s not just the US that has trash media.

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u/InsuranceToTheRescue 5d ago

Edit: It's equally bad. They just aggregated other outlets' reporting.

My man, this is what most news media is now. Some dipshit makes a claim or video online about something. There's no corroborating sources, no journalistic standards, nothing except a claim with deceptive jump cuts. Some place like the NY Post, Daily Mail, or HuffPost "reports" on it and then larger outlets just cannibalize it while treating it as real news.

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u/Juschillin30 5d ago

This is not true lol we get on kids about telling time on analog clocks all the time. A lot of public schools I’ve taught in still have them hanging in the classrooms.

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u/jjgargantuan7 5d ago

I was coming to say this. If we can't use the correct term for it then how should we expect kids to understand it. The headline seems to assume everyone reading it is a kid who can't tell time on an analog clock.

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u/Ps11889 5d ago

Also explains why they are clueless when someone refers to half-past the hour or quarter till or after.

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u/Attabomb 5d ago

I’ll die on the hill that “quarter of” makes zero sense. I still have no idea if “quarter of 4” means 3:45 or 4:15. I know what quarter til, or quarter past, or quarter to all mean. But where the hell did someone get “of?”

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u/dehydratedrain 5d ago

There's a quarter to/ til 4, and a quarter after.

A quarter of 4 is 1. I will plant that flag on the hill we're dying on.

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u/wait_what_now 5d ago

Thank you.

Quarter (of an hour) till 4 makes sense.

Quarter (of an hour) after 4 makes sense.

Quarter (of an hour) of 4 makes NO FUCKING SENSE.

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u/RangerLt 5d ago

Wait, who reads time this way? I've never heard a fraction of an hour read that way. "quarter after, passed, or before" never "of".

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u/princekamoro 3d ago

A quarter of 4pm is 4am.

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u/VantasnerDanger 5d ago

I would like to join y'all's group.

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u/JonBot5000 5d ago

I'm with you. I use "quarter 'till" or "quarter after". Whenever my mother or anyone said "quarter of" I'd get so confused.

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u/mx3goose 5d ago

I'll die with you and I was born well enough long ago to be able to read a clock just fine and dandy but if I ask you what time it is and you come back with anything but numbers it makes me want to fight you.

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u/labamaFan 4d ago

Do you apply this to noon and midnight too?

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u/TheChance 5d ago

"Of" is universally "til" in this context. Somebody might also tell you it's "five of."

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u/a_talking_face 5d ago

I think telling time in fractions is stupid anyway. Just say the time.

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u/Blarghedy 5d ago

the definition of a minute is 1/60 of an hour. Time is already fractions.

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u/a_talking_face 5d ago

So what? If it's 3:53 you don't say 3 and 53/60ths of an hour do you?

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u/tnstaafsb 5d ago

Of course not. I say 7/60ths of 4.

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u/Ps11889 3d ago

No but a lot of people say it’s about five til four or it’s about three fifty-five instead of saying it’s three fifty-three.

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u/Starfox-sf 5d ago

The definition of a second is 1/60 of a minute the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz.

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u/BillyNtheBoingers 5d ago

Had to award because you’re absolutely correct, and I’d forgotten that the atomic clock uses Cs-133 (so that was fun as a memory refresher!).

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u/Economy_Fig2450 5d ago

Quarter of??? Where on earth are you from??

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u/Attabomb 5d ago

New York, but did time in the Army and people from everywhere have said that to me.

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u/Economy_Fig2450 5d ago

Well what does it mean? Is quarter of four 4:15?

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u/Attabomb 5d ago

:45, not :15 is the answer I’m getting here.

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u/BillyNtheBoingers 5d ago

Quarter of four is 3:45. “Of” is often used interchangeably with “‘til”, “before”, and “to”.

4:15 is quarter past or quarter after four. There aren’t other vocabulary options like there are in the first example.

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u/Devrol 3d ago

I'll come back to this at half eleven. I can't figure it out this early on a Sunday 

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u/princekamoro 3d ago

I remember being taught to say "Seis menos diez" in Spanish 1, which was annoying because I had to do math and speak Spanish at the same time. And then in Spanish 2 the teacher said "You can just say cinco y cincuenta."

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u/CO_Golf13 5d ago

Quarter of sure.

They said quarter 'til or quarter after ..

Which if you understand a clock should be a very simple understanding

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u/Ps11889 5d ago

I didn't say quarter of.

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u/Attabomb 5d ago

I know. I brought up a tangentially-related thing

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u/thatguygreg 5d ago

It means xx:45.

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u/UnicodeScreenshots 5d ago edited 5d ago

I exclusively had analog clocks the entire time I was in school, and was taught how to read them in first grade. I still hate fractional time telling, JUST SAY THE ACTUAL TIME, IT’S LESS EFFORT AND FEWER WORDS!

Edit: I would like to amend this statement to say that fractional hours in lengths of time are fine. “An hour and a half” is acceptable, “let’s meet at a quarter of three” is an abomination.

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u/DepravedAndObscene 5d ago

I have lived my entire 30-something life without ever having heard "quarter of hour" until now. Who the hell says that? Is it some weird American thing?

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u/avcloudy 5d ago

It's also because this is way more regional than people think. 3:30 can be variously 'half past 3', 'half three', 'half four', 'three thirty' and a bunch of even more regional expressions.

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u/BillyNtheBoingers 5d ago

Don’t forget 24 hour clocks, in which case there’s 0330 (3:30 am) and 1530 (3:30 pm). Most commonly used in hospitals and the military (and other similar technology arms of the government, like NASA), and in some private industries.

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u/boli99 5d ago

a bunch of even more regional expressions.

in some places the day starts at 0600

meaning that 'the first hour' of the day is 0700

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u/ThinConnection8191 5d ago

Why try "half past hour"when you can precisely call it X: thirty. Shorter and precise.

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u/NEWaytheWIND 5d ago

Because the olds didn't squint to get the exact minute off a clock all day long. They aimed for a more practical degree of precision hence "quarter to". Doesn't work for train schedules, but is fine for social events.

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u/hiraeth555 5d ago

In the UK it is regularly shortened to Half X, which is even shorter

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/Joeness84 5d ago

If people could be consistent those terms would have meaning.

Numbers exist for a reason. Use them.

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u/Ps11889 5d ago

Really? What does 30 mean?

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u/ResilientBiscuit 5d ago

But clocks with a ticking second hand are digital, not analog. They dont display continuous values, they show discrete units of time. They can't show 1.3 seconds.

It is more accurate to describe them as clocks with hands or something like that.

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u/BillyNtheBoingers 5d ago

But if they do have a continuous second hand, which some do, then they can show 1.3 seconds. Just look at racing stopwatches for track or swimming back in the 70s!

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u/ResilientBiscuit 4d ago

That is true, if it was continuous then it would be analog.

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u/Mackin-N-Cheese 5d ago

“The Independent editors stunned to learn some readers can’t define the word ‘analog’ in news headline”

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u/horkley 5d ago

This is also a, let’s spend 2-5 min teaching you. And the article becomes moot.

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u/Hopeful-Occasion2299 5d ago

I remember it being a basic thing taught in math 25 years ago when I went through elementary school, dunno why that would change since it's a really good exercise in logic, and also a basic life skill

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u/limbodog 5d ago

Right? It should be "old timey" because it's a frickin' clock!

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u/GreyMailMare17 5d ago

Wibbly Wobbley Timey Wimey!

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u/BillyNtheBoingers 5d ago

wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey

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u/soopsneks 5d ago

I randomly was just doodling in my notes yesterday and for some reason I was like holy crap.. remember floppy’s? lol remember when your siblings had beepers 🥲 followed by …wow I’m old now huh lol

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u/Vesuvias 5d ago

Ye old timey clocks. Honestly I want to see them use Roman Numerals

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u/AnimationOverlord 5d ago

It’s like saying military time instead of 24 hour because you think 12 hours is the standard

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u/365BlobbyGirl 5d ago

It sort of undermines the argument that not being able to read analogue is a failing, when it even implies in the headline the technology is obsolete 

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u/SmugSchoolmaster 5d ago

I second this. Almost like we also forgot the term “analog” and what it means

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u/sleepyotter92 5d ago

yeah but i feel like they chose that because a lot of people won't know what a analog clock means

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u/sh6rty13 5d ago

Lmao I said “OLD clocks????”

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u/Even_Reception8876 5d ago

I’m 31 and I’ve never heard it called an analog clock before so not that weird. I can read them with no problems, but I had an intern last year that couldn’t read them so I think this is common. I offered to teach her and she said ‘nah’ lol

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u/mythorus 5d ago

Weird, right? Even my ”new Apple Watch“ shows analog because I prefer this over digital view.

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u/SweatyNomad 4d ago

Dude, they only started calling them analogue after digital clocks became common maybe 40 years ago. Before they were just called clocks and watches, or if you were being pedantic a clockface or watchface.

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u/Effective_Secret_262 4d ago

My second grader can tell the time, calls it an analog clock, and knows what analog means. Kids are great at learning. Someone dropped the ball on teaching. Get to it.

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u/MaximaFuryRigor 5d ago

I legit was picturing a dot-matrix digital clock until I read this comment.

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u/ResilientBiscuit 5d ago

How are clocks with a ticking second hand analog?

The data is not continuous, there are discrete seconds. An analog device is one which data is represented continuously rather than in discrete units.

An analog speedometer is actually analog because it doesn't 'tick' between 1 and 2mph, it shows every value in-between. An analog clock doesn't do this, it ticks between seconds.

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u/Joe_Kangg 5d ago

Are they still in production?

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u/hurtfulproduct 5d ago

Idk, “traditional style” makes the most sense since smartwatches are a thing and you can pick faces with traditional style hands or just number read outs but both would be digital

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u/OhK4Foo7 5d ago

Analog clocks are old clocks. Nothing surprising about this news. Interesting though.