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NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

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Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#61

Post by Pooge »

climb_stealth wrote: post #55
Pooge wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luxury watches are analog. Maybe people 50 years from now won't even know if the clock is telling the time correctly and will just wear the watch to show off...

The future is now. I personally know someone who does that. It's a fancy watch that only gets worn sometimes. And it's an automatic so it needs to be moved for it to keep running. So when they wear it every few days it is completely out of sync and they can't be bothered to adjust the time. It is purely an accessory and completely useless for telling the time. No judgment, but it just seems silly. Apparently the corr…

I inherited a mechanical watch from my grandmother and I can't stand it when it's even 1 minute off, haha

I'm quite young so I didn't really live with analog clocks but I got used to it because the watch is cool and I might as make it useful...

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#62

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

bgbntty2 wrote: post #49
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #25

What boggles my mind is that some people see clocks everyday and don't have the curiosity to go learn about it.

We also see thousands of other things everyday. You can't be curious about everything. Analog clocks, roman numerals and Morse code are unnecessary in modern living for 99%+ people, just like it's unnecessary for them to know why the moon always faces the same way or how a car engine works or what technologies are used by their computer monitor. It's good to know these facts exist and that they can be learned, but th…

For some that's about it, and others just go and learn them because they're interested.

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#63

Post by Pooge »

dmd wrote: post #54
Pooge wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luxury watches are analog. Maybe people 50 years from now won't even know if the clock is telling the time correctly and will just wear the watch to show off...

50 years from now? this is already absolutely a thing.

Maybe you're right. Even if the clock is off, I always assumed the wearer was at least able to read an analog clock.

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#64

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

jackvalentine wrote: post #27
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. Information is everywhere, if they WANTED to learn how to read them they could go on wikipedia or youtube. That excuse could've worked when I was a teenager, where to learn something you have to either learn it from a person or from a book, but not nowadays.

Children need instruction, they’re not born with an inbuilt list of things they should probably learn and the desire to go and learn them without guidance.

If we were talking about 6 year olds I wouldn't made this comment. Plenty of teenagers are curious about the world around them. The ones that can't read a clock, aren't. By the time people get to their teens there's already a huge huge range of interests and yes, IQ too.

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#65

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

amitav1 wrote: post #31
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit. Information is everywhere, if they WANTED to learn how to read them they could go on wikipedia or youtube. That excuse could've worked when I was a teenager, where to learn something you have to either learn it from a person or from a book, but not nowadays.

Is learning how to read an analogue clock really an effective use of one's time? I myself was taught how an am able to read an analogue clock, but I doubt that I would be much worse off without that abulity.

Why learn anything, just ask chatgpt gang, amirite.

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#66

Post by jemmyw »

amitav1 wrote: post #36
TheChaplain wrote: post #14

The fact that US children doesn't know how to read clocks doesn't surprise me, but what about other countries? Is reading a clock taught to students in India, Japan, China, Chile?

Not a student in any of those countries, but speaking as a Canadian: I was taught how to read a clock in early grade school (grade 1, I believe?), and retain this ability now. I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years given that I tend to keep my phone on me much more often than before. I believe that most Canadian kids were probably taught to read a clock, but by high school when everybody has phone…

> I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years

Do you really see that? If a numberless analogue clock turned up in a society that had the same time system but had only ever used digital clocks, how long would it take to figure out how to read it? I'm fairly confident a logical person would figure it out in far less than an hour, and for you to relearn it: about 2 minutes. Once you perceive the movement of one hand you're there. For kids, learning the clock is also learning about time, numbers and fractions, so I'm assuming you won't also forget those things.

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#67

Post by Nextgrid »

ColinWright wrote: post #46

Not sure it's entirely relevant, but I'm pretty sure that research done for instrumentation in aeroplane flight decks shows that information is transferred faster and more reliably from the instruments to the pilots when it's analogue. That's why even the modern glass/digital instrument panels have simulated "tape". They also include digital readouts for added accuracy, but it's the analogue versions that transfer in…

Not sure about which one is faster to read for a static value - most analog simulated instruments are relative which means you still need to read a digital readout to get the absolute value.

One thing analog instruments/tapes do that a simple digital readout won’t is they easily communicate the rate of change of the value.

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#68

Post by Youden »

Is it really important that people be educated in the reading of analog clocks?

I think it's clear to most people that digital clocks are easier to read - they're numbers that you read the same as any other numbers; they can be read at a glance without special training.

Analog clocks can also be read at a glance but require the reader to acquire a non-transferable skill.

When I was growing up (90's, 00's), digital clocks weren't yet ubiquitous the way they are now so I can understand why they were taught to me as a child but in 2025, I suspect the average adult finds a digital clock within their line of sight ~20x more frequently than any kind of analog clock.

If you read this and still think it's important that children learn how to read analog clocks, I'd like to know: assuming digital clocks continue their growth and analog clocks become less and less common, when exactly can we stop teaching analog clocks?

In a similar vein, if there's anyone around here who learned the abacus in school, I'm curious what you think of this. Is the analog clock the abacus, waiting to be phased out in favour of the calculator, or is there another way to look at it?

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#69

Post by bgbntty2 »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #62
bgbntty2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also see thousands of other things everyday. You can't be curious about everything. Analog clocks, roman numerals and Morse code are unnecessary in modern living for 99%+ people, just like it's unnecessary for them to know why the moon always faces the same way or how a car engine works or what technologies are used by their computer monitor. It's good to know these facts exist and that they can be learned, but th…

For some that's about it, and others just go and learn them because they're interested.

That was my point, although I might've written it poorly. You can't go and learn everything. We're surrounded and bombarded by so much information, so many different things every day. Even very intelligent and curious people who read and learn all the time don't know everything. Just sitting at my desk I can probably think of 1000 things that pique my interest, but I don't try to learn about them because I know I have a very limited life on this planet. It's impossible to know everything, even to read all of Wikipedia.

Re: NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

#70

Post by amitav1 »

jemmyw wrote: post #66
amitav1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a student in any of those countries, but speaking as a Canadian: I was taught how to read a clock in early grade school (grade 1, I believe?), and retain this ability now. I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years given that I tend to keep my phone on me much more often than before. I believe that most Canadian kids were probably taught to read a clock, but by high school when everybody has phone…

> I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years Do you really see that? If a numberless analogue clock turned up in a society that had the same time system but had only ever used digital clocks, how long would it take to figure out how to read it? I'm fairly confident a logical person would figure it out in far less than an hour, and for you to relearn it: about 2 minutes. Once you perceive the movement…

What I mean by "forget" is more about losing fluency. Right now when I look at a clock, I can have the hour in around half of a second and the minute in another half a second. But I know that a) I was faster a few years ago and that b) this trend for me will likely not reverse.
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