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NYC phone ban reveals some students can't read clocks

45 points by geox 10mo ago

schoen 10mo ago
I remember in 3rd or 4th grade I felt sure I knew how to read a clock (then usually analog) until the teacher started a formal classroom unit to teach us. I realized that I had only understood how to read the hour hand but not the minute or second hands. Illusion of competence or illusion of depth or something.
condensedcrab 10mo ago
It may just be me, but it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones. That being said, I’ve enjoyed wearing my analog watch the last few years to tell time instead of having to pull out my phone all the time. Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way…
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones Have been but haven’t and likely never will given analog clocks are beautiful. Reading clocks is simple. Creating a class and educational divide around it is silly. Doing so unintentionally is insane. (And I assume there are more analog clocks lurking in the shadows.)
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
  > Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way… How so? Like, using them as clocks? If a Switch fit in my pocket and showed me the time when I pulled it out without even having to press the power button or interact with it, I guess I can't see why I wouldn't do that?
- consp 10mo ago
  Almost all wall clocks sold here are analogue ones. And they are in almost every home and public place. (Looking at the clock section in the hardware store and the municipality Office/train station combination) Most digital clocks are alarms. As soon as it becomes a computer and not primary a time device it becomes more digital.
OgsyedIE 10mo ago
The discussion about this on the teachers subreddit repeated the claim of 'Of course they can't read a clock, NY teachers are only allowed to teach things that are explicitly specified on any of the syllabi or tests and reading a clock isn't on the list.'. The other internet fora for teachers have exactly as much cynicism as you'd expect too, but there is an implied grain of truth: Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded. RAND estimated K-12 unexplained absences reached 21% in 2023 and early estimates for the last year suggest that strong attention to fixing it has brought it down to 13%, which is an improvement but is still way too high.
- themafia 10mo ago
  > Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded. That buries the lede. Why don't they have time? Isn't education their goal? Or is test taking their goal? And why? Is it because the school gets federal funding based on test results and student attendance? We've ruined schools the same way the British found the Cobra Effect. We've created entirely the wrong incentives for everyone involved.
  - supertrope 10mo ago
    Educating and socializing kids takes more than 180 days a year. It takes a village to raise a kid. Think of all the things you learned from your parents, your extended family, your sports coach, your neighbor, or the manager of the corner store you frequented. Did you ever have a lesson at school about tying your shoe laces? How did you learn that advertisements don't have tell the truth? Teaching to the test is about pulling low achieving students up to standard, not so much about supporting high performing students. Even though a lot of difference between a good school district and bad school district comes down to out of classroom factors like socioeconomic class and parental involvement, the district gets praise or blame. The district can't fix food insecurity, absent parents, abuse, and anti-intellectual attitudes. But it can focus those 180 days on reading and math and specifically what's on the test.
wan23 10mo ago
One thing that's tricky about analog clocks if you're not used to them - the hour hand sweeps unnecessarily over the course of an hour so you have to find the hour hand then go backwards. We have the technology to make clocks where the hour hand actually points to the hour that it is. I don't understand why the jump hour feature isn't more common.
- anotherhue 10mo ago
  That would make it discontinuous, which means there's no information beyond the integer. I think, though I don't know how I'd prove, that anyone truly used to an analogue wristwatch probably only looks at the hour hand when casually checking. Many watches don't even have face markings.
  - lynndotpy 10mo ago
    I disagree with this. I read analogue clocks without having to do any conscious mental effort, but the minute hand is definitely a part of it. If I have to think about how I parse them, I think the minute hand is more important than the hour hand. I'm usually roughly aware of what hour it is, and if I'm looking at a clock, it's to know what minute it is.
- functionmouse 10mo ago
  Wouldn't 4:58 with jump hour look too much like 4:00?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- SilasX 10mo ago
  That's a good point. The hour hand moves continuously as an artifact of technical constraints on the original clocks -- which I think is a great example of achieving a balance between UI and technical feasibility -- but we don't technically need them to work that way anymore, and digital clocks work exactly like that. With that said, it's not obvious that we should use the jump hour UI[1]. It's desirable to have the hour hand be close to 4 when it's close to 4 o'clock. Like the neighbor comment says, that prevents you from confusing 4:58 with ~4. [1] See my "continuity heuristic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391
pedalpete 10mo ago
This makes me wonder what methods of transferring information we may have lost historically that we don't even recognize? Will there be analog clocks in 30 years? It seems somewhat doubtful, particularly if this generation can't read them. What benefit is there to keep this antiquated method around, aside from just as an historical reference? I'm in my 50s, so I can read an analog clock, and I have analog watches. But I don't feel the need to force this method of time on future generations. Digital clocks are not subject to the drift that analog clocks are, they don't require the user to learn to read them, and if they are broken, it is fairly obvious at first glance. What benefit does an analog clock have, aside from that it can work without power? And even then, it's only those that are purely mechanical, which I think is also dying out.
- Pooge 10mo ago
  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...
  - dmd 10mo ago
    50 years from now? this is already absolutely a thing.
    - Pooge 10mo ago
      Maybe you're right. Even if the clock is off, I always assumed the wearer was at least able to read an analog clock.
  - climb_stealth 10mo ago
    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 correct way to solve it is to store the watch in a cradle that keeps it moving perpetually.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
themafia 10mo ago
This framing aggravates me. Of course they /can/ read clocks. You just haven't _taught_ them how to do it yet, and up until now, they've had no reason to do it. It's divisive and weird.
- sieabahlpark 10mo ago
  [dead]
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
  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.
  - jackvalentine 10mo ago
    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.
    - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
      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.
      - jackvalentine 10mo ago
        Relying on ‘plenty of children are curious enough to be motivated to go figure it out’ as a teaching strategy is pretty wild.
        ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
TheChaplain 10mo ago
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?
- HnUser12 10mo ago
  I don’t know about other countries, but it is taught in India in a few schools I am exposed to. Analog wall clocks are fairly common in most Indian households.
- lini 10mo ago
  I have experience with an IB school in Europe - the kids have a special unit about clocks (analog and digital) in their math class in fourth grade. The student books have a lot of problems involving reading both types of clocks and calculating diffenreces between two clocks in hours/minutes/seconds.
- amitav1 10mo ago
  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 phones there's not much reason to.
  - jemmyw 10mo ago
    > 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.
dusted 10mo ago
When I was a kid, before kinder garden, I remember my parents beginning to teach me how to read an analogue clock.. But I this was the late 80s, maybe it was 1990, but, this thing called Digital Clocks were a thing at the time.. And I absolutely refused to learn that old fashioned shit when I was already staring right at the objectively better solution.. My reasoning was that the old clocks would either be replaced by digital clocks within a short time, and those that weren't replace would be when they broke (5 year old me didn't grasp the idea that people would continue buying the obviously inferior products until this very day), honestly, I'm still a bit perplexed by the fact that one can buy an analogue clock today.. It's objectively inferior in every way.. Most of them don't even do 24 hours, which, is the amount of hours we have in a day, leading some idiots to refer to 18:00 as "six-o-clock", and other idiots (like myself) to have to ask EVERY_TIME someone tells me a time that's less than, or equal to 12.. fuck that shit. Yeah, I learned how to read inferior clocks, but.. I don't see the point. So no, it's not that those students can't read a clock, they just can't read an analogue one, because they're probably need to as often as they need to read an octal clock, or a binary led clock, or a 24 hour dial clock, or Chinese..
- throw20251220 10mo ago
  Wow, you must have been violated by an analog clock somewhere sometime. It left a visible trauma. Go get help.
- mckn1ght 10mo ago
  Excuse me while I prima facie dismiss a kindergartner’s opinion on what is an “objectively” superior/inferior system. It’s your opinion and prerogative, don’t try to masquerade it as settled truth.
- bgbntty2 10mo ago
  Years ago I once wasted 2 hours arriving at 07:00 instead of 19:00. The AM/PM stuff is ridiculous, especially when people don't specify it. It was the time we were going to leave for a trip, so 07:00 or 19:00 were all acceptable times. So 24-hour time is obviously better. Most people don't even bother saying "AM" or "PM" if it even exists in their language or culture. I think analog clocks are mostly for old people who don't like change, for people nostalgic for the past, for people who think like it makes them better, smarter, fancier of classier somehow - especially with expensive mechanical analog watches.
ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
What boggles my mind is that some people see clocks everyday and don't have the curiosity to go learn about it.
- bgbntty2 10mo ago
  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 that's about it.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
    For some that's about it, and others just go and learn them because they're interested.
    - bgbntty2 10mo ago
      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.
    - senordevnyc 10mo ago
      You only learn about a tiny fraction of the things you see on a daily basis. Why? Is it because you're too lazy and stupid to learn about the others, as you seem to be implying throughout your comments here?
- shsusj 10mo ago
  I think some cultures (especially sub Saharan ones) didn’t really have a concept of precise time in their language. It’s lead to things like “Africa time”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time I think we all suffer from a lot of bias and assumptions about how other cultures operate. I also wonder if above article correlates with race - similar to a lot of other recent declining US education stats, it tracks pretty well with white % of population going down.
crmd 10mo ago
> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said. i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.
- dfadsadsf 10mo ago
  30% of NYC public school students are functionally illiterate in high school. There is zero chance you will be able to teach them analog clock in a day and forget about an hour.
ColinWright 10mo ago
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are ... ... so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
ColinWright 10mo ago
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 information "at a glance".
- Nextgrid 10mo ago
  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.
- georgefrowny 10mo ago
  I disagree here. I find it much faster to read the speed from a digital speedo than an analogue one (especially as most cars compress the road legal range into under half the dial). Especially in a 20 zones, a few mph is just a tiny needle movement but you definitely can get a ticket for it. Analogue is better when your want to see something moving through the range though.
throawayonthe 10mo ago
> That's a major skill that they're not used to at all how major is it really? seems incredibly limited in its use, and largely unnecessary in the modern world, with the existence of digital clocks (especially 24 hour ones!) I expect it will go the way of telephone rotary dials etc - something you could learn in under an hour but have no reason to...
ribosometronome 10mo ago
I feel like most of these comments have ignored the article. They were taught how to read clocks, in first and second grade. Then they had no need of the skill for most of a decade and it atrophied. I suspect many would struggle to remember some of the things we had down well in elementary school, like writing fully in cursive, knowing the difference between types of rocks and clouds, or giving some full speech you had to memorize at the time (it was Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty" speech for me). And if you're someone who does know the difference between your cumulonimbus, cirrocumulus and such, rad! But do you suspect most of your peers remember? I think the better question is, and the article poses this, why are students not bothering to refresh the skill now that it's necessary again?
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo ago
  I wrote in cursive all the way through university (so, a lot of writing). After that, only keyboard. I realized I forgot how to write some capital cased letters.
- anthonj 10mo ago
  Uhm I don't know, I used to have a dumb phone in middle school. And since then I have always read the time in 24h format in my life. But I never struggle to read a conventional clocks, nor I get confused about the am/pm 12h format. The concept around the clock is just too simple to just forget. This sounds like a case of sloppiness of their educators.
Youden 10mo ago
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?
Yizahi 10mo ago
I'm honestly baffled at this either revelation or a meme, being reposted over past few years, about modern teenagers unable to recognize or use some tech predating them. I was born around 90s and never had to use for example a typewriter or punch-cards or 8" diskettes, but I could recognize all that stuff without any training since my childhood. Same with most other gadgets from before my generation. How come kids are supposedly can't recognize a rotary phone for example? Or an analog clock?
puppycodes 10mo ago
this reminds me of learning cursive
j_w 10mo ago
The comments about analog clock reading being not a worthwhile skill are telling, but not in a good way. Analog clocks are still very prevalent today. People buy smartwatches, but plenty of people also buy analog watches. Some people even display an analog clock on their smart watch. Analog clock reading is a completely valid educational tool as well. It takes some basic spatial reasoning. Division, approximation, rounding, some beginnings of the ideas useful later in trig. In 10+ years will people on Hackernews be arguing about how reading is useless because of progression text to speech and speech to text makes it effectively a useless endeavor?
- doom2 10mo ago
  I'm also very confused by the almost complete dismissal of intellectual curiosity in this thread. People learn things they don't _need_ to learn all the time and post about it here without being met with a "I don't need to learn that so why would anyone learn that" attitude. It's baffling.
  - georgefrowny 10mo ago
    It's very strange, especially on Hacker News. What's stranger to me, assuming these kids are in classrooms with analogue clocks, is that they aren't constantly subdividing the clock face in every more complex mental schemes in boring lessons. "Just 2 more minutes, and then we'll be exactly 5/8 of the way through the second half of the lesson." Maybe I am the weird one here.
troad 10mo ago
Good. Let's not be all "well, I had to learn it, therefore..." It's a pointless skill. Let it die. Teach the kids something useful instead. I wear an analogue watch myself, but I'd happily trade all my knowledge of analogue clock faces for an equivalent amount of knowledge in any area of interest to me.

45 points by geox 10mo ago

schoen 10mo ago

I remember in 3rd or 4th grade I felt sure I knew how to read a clock (then usually analog) until the teacher started a formal classroom unit to teach us. I realized that I had only understood how to read the hour hand but not the minute or second hands. Illusion of competence or illusion of depth or something.

condensedcrab 10mo ago

It may just be me, but it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones. That being said, I’ve enjoyed wearing my analog watch the last few years to tell time instead of having to pull out my phone all the time. Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way…

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones Have been but haven’t and likely never will given analog clocks are beautiful. Reading clocks is simple. Creating a class and educational divide around it is silly. Doing so unintentionally is insane. (And I assume there are more analog clocks lurking in the shadows.)
yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
> Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way… How so? Like, using them as clocks? If a Switch fit in my pocket and showed me the time when I pulled it out without even having to press the power button or interact with it, I guess I can't see why I wouldn't do that?
consp 10mo ago
Almost all wall clocks sold here are analogue ones. And they are in almost every home and public place. (Looking at the clock section in the hardware store and the municipality Office/train station combination) Most digital clocks are alarms. As soon as it becomes a computer and not primary a time device it becomes more digital.

OgsyedIE 10mo ago

The discussion about this on the teachers subreddit repeated the claim of 'Of course they can't read a clock, NY teachers are only allowed to teach things that are explicitly specified on any of the syllabi or tests and reading a clock isn't on the list.'. The other internet fora for teachers have exactly as much cynicism as you'd expect too, but there is an implied grain of truth: Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded. RAND estimated K-12 unexplained absences reached 21% in 2023 and early estimates for the last year suggest that strong attention to fixing it has brought it down to 13%, which is an improvement but is still way too high.

themafia 10mo ago
> Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded. That buries the lede. Why don't they have time? Isn't education their goal? Or is test taking their goal? And why? Is it because the school gets federal funding based on test results and student attendance? We've ruined schools the same way the British found the Cobra Effect. We've created entirely the wrong incentives for everyone involved.
- supertrope 10mo ago
  Educating and socializing kids takes more than 180 days a year. It takes a village to raise a kid. Think of all the things you learned from your parents, your extended family, your sports coach, your neighbor, or the manager of the corner store you frequented. Did you ever have a lesson at school about tying your shoe laces? How did you learn that advertisements don't have tell the truth? Teaching to the test is about pulling low achieving students up to standard, not so much about supporting high performing students. Even though a lot of difference between a good school district and bad school district comes down to out of classroom factors like socioeconomic class and parental involvement, the district gets praise or blame. The district can't fix food insecurity, absent parents, abuse, and anti-intellectual attitudes. But it can focus those 180 days on reading and math and specifically what's on the test.

wan23 10mo ago

One thing that's tricky about analog clocks if you're not used to them - the hour hand sweeps unnecessarily over the course of an hour so you have to find the hour hand then go backwards. We have the technology to make clocks where the hour hand actually points to the hour that it is. I don't understand why the jump hour feature isn't more common.

anotherhue 10mo ago
That would make it discontinuous, which means there's no information beyond the integer. I think, though I don't know how I'd prove, that anyone truly used to an analogue wristwatch probably only looks at the hour hand when casually checking. Many watches don't even have face markings.
- lynndotpy 10mo ago
  I disagree with this. I read analogue clocks without having to do any conscious mental effort, but the minute hand is definitely a part of it. If I have to think about how I parse them, I think the minute hand is more important than the hour hand. I'm usually roughly aware of what hour it is, and if I'm looking at a clock, it's to know what minute it is.
functionmouse 10mo ago
Wouldn't 4:58 with jump hour look too much like 4:00?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
SilasX 10mo ago
That's a good point. The hour hand moves continuously as an artifact of technical constraints on the original clocks -- which I think is a great example of achieving a balance between UI and technical feasibility -- but we don't technically need them to work that way anymore, and digital clocks work exactly like that. With that said, it's not obvious that we should use the jump hour UI[1]. It's desirable to have the hour hand be close to 4 when it's close to 4 o'clock. Like the neighbor comment says, that prevents you from confusing 4:58 with ~4. [1] See my "continuity heuristic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391

pedalpete 10mo ago

This makes me wonder what methods of transferring information we may have lost historically that we don't even recognize? Will there be analog clocks in 30 years? It seems somewhat doubtful, particularly if this generation can't read them. What benefit is there to keep this antiquated method around, aside from just as an historical reference? I'm in my 50s, so I can read an analog clock, and I have analog watches. But I don't feel the need to force this method of time on future generations. Digital clocks are not subject to the drift that analog clocks are, they don't require the user to learn to read them, and if they are broken, it is fairly obvious at first glance. What benefit does an analog clock have, aside from that it can work without power? And even then, it's only those that are purely mechanical, which I think is also dying out.

Pooge 10mo ago
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...
- dmd 10mo ago
  50 years from now? this is already absolutely a thing.
  - Pooge 10mo ago
    Maybe you're right. Even if the clock is off, I always assumed the wearer was at least able to read an analog clock.
- climb_stealth 10mo ago
  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 correct way to solve it is to store the watch in a cradle that keeps it moving perpetually.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

themafia 10mo ago

This framing aggravates me. Of course they /can/ read clocks. You just haven't _taught_ them how to do it yet, and up until now, they've had no reason to do it. It's divisive and weird.

sieabahlpark 10mo ago
[dead]
ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
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.
- jackvalentine 10mo ago
  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.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
    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.
    - jackvalentine 10mo ago
      Relying on ‘plenty of children are curious enough to be motivated to go figure it out’ as a teaching strategy is pretty wild.
      - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago

TheChaplain 10mo ago

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?

HnUser12 10mo ago
I don’t know about other countries, but it is taught in India in a few schools I am exposed to. Analog wall clocks are fairly common in most Indian households.
lini 10mo ago
I have experience with an IB school in Europe - the kids have a special unit about clocks (analog and digital) in their math class in fourth grade. The student books have a lot of problems involving reading both types of clocks and calculating diffenreces between two clocks in hours/minutes/seconds.
amitav1 10mo ago
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 phones there's not much reason to.
- jemmyw 10mo ago
  > 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.

dusted 10mo ago

When I was a kid, before kinder garden, I remember my parents beginning to teach me how to read an analogue clock.. But I this was the late 80s, maybe it was 1990, but, this thing called Digital Clocks were a thing at the time.. And I absolutely refused to learn that old fashioned shit when I was already staring right at the objectively better solution.. My reasoning was that the old clocks would either be replaced by digital clocks within a short time, and those that weren't replace would be when they broke (5 year old me didn't grasp the idea that people would continue buying the obviously inferior products until this very day), honestly, I'm still a bit perplexed by the fact that one can buy an analogue clock today.. It's objectively inferior in every way.. Most of them don't even do 24 hours, which, is the amount of hours we have in a day, leading some idiots to refer to 18:00 as "six-o-clock", and other idiots (like myself) to have to ask EVERY_TIME someone tells me a time that's less than, or equal to 12.. fuck that shit. Yeah, I learned how to read inferior clocks, but.. I don't see the point. So no, it's not that those students can't read a clock, they just can't read an analogue one, because they're probably need to as often as they need to read an octal clock, or a binary led clock, or a 24 hour dial clock, or Chinese..

throw20251220 10mo ago
Wow, you must have been violated by an analog clock somewhere sometime. It left a visible trauma. Go get help.
mckn1ght 10mo ago
Excuse me while I prima facie dismiss a kindergartner’s opinion on what is an “objectively” superior/inferior system. It’s your opinion and prerogative, don’t try to masquerade it as settled truth.
bgbntty2 10mo ago
Years ago I once wasted 2 hours arriving at 07:00 instead of 19:00. The AM/PM stuff is ridiculous, especially when people don't specify it. It was the time we were going to leave for a trip, so 07:00 or 19:00 were all acceptable times. So 24-hour time is obviously better. Most people don't even bother saying "AM" or "PM" if it even exists in their language or culture. I think analog clocks are mostly for old people who don't like change, for people nostalgic for the past, for people who think like it makes them better, smarter, fancier of classier somehow - especially with expensive mechanical analog watches.

ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago

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

bgbntty2 10mo ago
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 that's about it.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
  For some that's about it, and others just go and learn them because they're interested.
  - bgbntty2 10mo ago
    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.
  - senordevnyc 10mo ago
    You only learn about a tiny fraction of the things you see on a daily basis. Why? Is it because you're too lazy and stupid to learn about the others, as you seem to be implying throughout your comments here?
shsusj 10mo ago
I think some cultures (especially sub Saharan ones) didn’t really have a concept of precise time in their language. It’s lead to things like “Africa time”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time I think we all suffer from a lot of bias and assumptions about how other cultures operate. I also wonder if above article correlates with race - similar to a lot of other recent declining US education stats, it tracks pretty well with white % of population going down.

crmd 10mo ago

> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said. i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.

dfadsadsf 10mo ago
30% of NYC public school students are functionally illiterate in high school. There is zero chance you will be able to teach them analog clock in a day and forget about an hour.

ColinWright 10mo ago

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are ... ... so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

ColinWright 10mo ago

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 information "at a glance".

Nextgrid 10mo ago
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.
georgefrowny 10mo ago
I disagree here. I find it much faster to read the speed from a digital speedo than an analogue one (especially as most cars compress the road legal range into under half the dial). Especially in a 20 zones, a few mph is just a tiny needle movement but you definitely can get a ticket for it. Analogue is better when your want to see something moving through the range though.

throawayonthe 10mo ago

> That's a major skill that they're not used to at all how major is it really? seems incredibly limited in its use, and largely unnecessary in the modern world, with the existence of digital clocks (especially 24 hour ones!) I expect it will go the way of telephone rotary dials etc - something you could learn in under an hour but have no reason to...

ribosometronome 10mo ago

I feel like most of these comments have ignored the article. They were taught how to read clocks, in first and second grade. Then they had no need of the skill for most of a decade and it atrophied. I suspect many would struggle to remember some of the things we had down well in elementary school, like writing fully in cursive, knowing the difference between types of rocks and clouds, or giving some full speech you had to memorize at the time (it was Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty" speech for me). And if you're someone who does know the difference between your cumulonimbus, cirrocumulus and such, rad! But do you suspect most of your peers remember? I think the better question is, and the article poses this, why are students not bothering to refresh the skill now that it's necessary again?

Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo ago
I wrote in cursive all the way through university (so, a lot of writing). After that, only keyboard. I realized I forgot how to write some capital cased letters.
anthonj 10mo ago
Uhm I don't know, I used to have a dumb phone in middle school. And since then I have always read the time in 24h format in my life. But I never struggle to read a conventional clocks, nor I get confused about the am/pm 12h format. The concept around the clock is just too simple to just forget. This sounds like a case of sloppiness of their educators.

Youden 10mo ago

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?

Yizahi 10mo ago

I'm honestly baffled at this either revelation or a meme, being reposted over past few years, about modern teenagers unable to recognize or use some tech predating them. I was born around 90s and never had to use for example a typewriter or punch-cards or 8" diskettes, but I could recognize all that stuff without any training since my childhood. Same with most other gadgets from before my generation. How come kids are supposedly can't recognize a rotary phone for example? Or an analog clock?

puppycodes 10mo ago

this reminds me of learning cursive

j_w 10mo ago

The comments about analog clock reading being not a worthwhile skill are telling, but not in a good way. Analog clocks are still very prevalent today. People buy smartwatches, but plenty of people also buy analog watches. Some people even display an analog clock on their smart watch. Analog clock reading is a completely valid educational tool as well. It takes some basic spatial reasoning. Division, approximation, rounding, some beginnings of the ideas useful later in trig. In 10+ years will people on Hackernews be arguing about how reading is useless because of progression text to speech and speech to text makes it effectively a useless endeavor?

doom2 10mo ago
I'm also very confused by the almost complete dismissal of intellectual curiosity in this thread. People learn things they don't _need_ to learn all the time and post about it here without being met with a "I don't need to learn that so why would anyone learn that" attitude. It's baffling.
- georgefrowny 10mo ago
  It's very strange, especially on Hacker News. What's stranger to me, assuming these kids are in classrooms with analogue clocks, is that they aren't constantly subdividing the clock face in every more complex mental schemes in boring lessons. "Just 2 more minutes, and then we'll be exactly 5/8 of the way through the second half of the lesson." Maybe I am the weird one here.

troad 10mo ago

Good. Let's not be all "well, I had to learn it, therefore..." It's a pointless skill. Let it die. Teach the kids something useful instead. I wear an analogue watch myself, but I'd happily trade all my knowledge of analogue clock faces for an equivalent amount of knowledge in any area of interest to me.