At least 31 states and the District of Columbia restrict cell phones in schools
New York City teachers say the state’s recently implemented cell phone ban in schools has showed that numerous students no longer know how to tell time on an old-fashioned clock.
“That’s a major skill that they’re not used to at all,” Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, told Gothamist of what she’s noticed after the ban, which went into effect in September.
Students in the city’s school system are meant to learn basic time-telling skills in the first and second grade, according to officials, though it appears children have fallen out of practice doing so in an increasingly digital world.
‘Old clocks’? You mean… analog clocks? The ones in practically every household outside of America?
Outside of america ,explain more
And in! Lots of homes (edit: and other places!) have analog clocks here in the US. Historically, the US has had some really beautiful designs, too.
where can I get one of those Anal OG clocks?
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My mom has a thing for clocks. There are some places in her house where you can see 5 clocks, not counting watches or smartphones. No, I don’t need a clock in the bathroom, yet there it is. Granted, some of those are digital clocks, but some are also analog with Roman numerals.
When I grew up we looked at the height of the pile in the hourglass and we liked it! The rich kids all had sundial wristwatches though.
Ok zoomer
pfff bet you were one of those poors with a bucket with a hole in it
I feel like they’d know within days if you made it a phone game…
I’ve been hearing this since I was a kid, though back then they just blamed the use of digital clocks instead of phones.
I used to think it was a meme too and I still think it is to a point. But several of my recent jobs were at universities and I have met several people younger than me now who cannot read an analog clock, use a mouse, copy a file to a flash drive, or make change. To say nothing of their ability to find information that can’t be googled (like the location of a classroom). I have really begun to feel that the general population has absolutely failed GenZ and I really hope we can break the pattern before GenAlpha gets much older.
I met someone the other year who didn’t know the difference between cut and paste, and copy and paste
Edit: I agree with the last part of your comment especially. So often, I see people blaming GenZ for their lack of knowledge, but that feels unfair to me. From my perspective as a younger Millennial, it looked like society seemed to assume “oh, GenZ are digital natives, so they’re naturally a whizz at all this computer stuff” and often assumed that it wasn’t necessary to do much work to teach them how to use computers. Now that I’ve had more chance to meet GenZ folk in the workplace, I’ve heard this complaint from them a lot.
It’s made me grateful for growing up as a Millennial. I was too young to experience the early days of computing, but at least I got to experience computers and the internet before they became the closed, walled-off gardens that GenZ grew up with
“These newfangled analog clocks with hands are killing the ability of people to understand clock bells. Kids these days.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striking_clock
A striking clock is a clock that sounds the hours audibly on a bell, gong, or other audible device. In 12-hour striking, used most commonly in striking clocks today, the clock strikes once at 1:00 am, twice at 2:00 am, continuing in this way up to twelve times at 12:00 mid-day, then starts again, striking once at 1:00 pm, twice at 2:00 pm, and the pattern continues up to twelve times at 12:00 midnight.
The striking feature of clocks was originally more important than their clock faces; the earliest clocks struck the hours, but had no dials to enable the time to be read.[1] The development of mechanical clocks in 12th century Europe was motivated by the need to ring bells upon the canonical hours to call the community to prayer. The earliest known mechanical clocks were large striking clocks installed in towers in monasteries or public squares, so that their bells could be heard far away.
I just want to say, as someone who lives near such a bell, I’m grateful that they appear to observe “quiet hours” between 8pm and 8am. When I first moved in, I was worried it’d be dinging all night. Thank goodness that’s not the case.
I just have car alarms going off for no reason at 4am to worry about.
I used to live in a city with many striking clocks, which meant that no matter where you were in the city, you could probably hear a bell ring out on the hour.
I’m realising now how much I miss it. I remember times like drinking with friends into the wee hours of the morning, when we would hear a bell and then all fall silent as we counted how many chimes there were. If it was only 2, we would laugh and continue, but for four or more, we would wince and contemplate the future consequences of our choices.
Or while doing an all-nighter to get an assignment in before a morning deadline, how my handwriting speed would become a touch more frantic with each passing chime
I thought these were still common? Any time I’m near a church they do their thing every 15 minutes, banging one bell 1-4 times and then if it’s 4 they bang another 1-12 times, signaling the time.
Well, not entirely, they’re usually quiet during the night, but you get my point.
Didn’t know people can’t understand those anymore.
The one near me plays the 4 bar “Westminster Quarters”. It plays one bar for each quarter hour. The full song on the hour, and bangs out the hour.
Elder millennial here, I also struggle reading analogue clocks to this day. I can, but it just takes me a long time to do so. And I’ve been like this since I was a little kid.
I remember a time when I couldn’t tell time with an analogue clock.
I walked to school by myself from age 7. When my parents left for work they said I should get going when the big hand is pointing straight down.
I still have to take a second to actually process the analog time (at least for minutes)
I think we’ve had 50/50% analogue and digital clocks at home. Analogue on walls and wrists, digital on microwaves and VCRs. I’m sure that helped make the connection.
I can understand that kids are not motivated to practice telling time from an oldskool watchface when they always have a digital clock in their pocket.
We recently switched cars. The previous one had a big digital display for the speed. My wife is completely unable to tell the speed from a regular gauge now.
Same here, it takes a fair bit of thinking, but can be done. Some people think it’s funny/sad that it needs processing time, but I never practice the skill, because I really never need to, so who cares? It’s never been something that has made intuitive sense to me, and has always been a struggle, but there have been digital alternatives nearly my entire life which are now far more common, so why bother getting better?
There’s an interesting technology connections video on how analog clocks can be easier to parse how “far” through the hour/day you are with just a quick glance. Hand almost at the top means the hours almost up, for instance.
I have trouble with numbers (they didn’t have dyscalculia when I was a kid) and this was a chief complaint of mine, moving from elementary school to high school, where the clock were all digital. I had to “convert” it in my head to the clock face so my image-oriented brain could properly grasp it. Took me a few years to normalize it.
do we need a video essay to know that a clock display that is basically just progress bars is a good way to tell progress in that progress bar?
Maybe not but technology connections is great.
no doubt it’s a great channel.
This isn’t interesting
Why are you stunned? Most kids today are raising themselves. If it’s not a skill you teach in school, it’s not like they are learning it somewhere else.
Others have tried to evade the spirit of the ban, using other digital devices sich as older iPods, or bringing walkie-talkies to school.
I’m not an advocate of smartphone bans, but necessity is the mother of invention, and I suppose that if some kids start cobbling together packet radio solutions to talk with their friends and reach the Internet, it’ll probably be an educational experience.
I’d be hilarious if they started using and contributing to the meshtastic network.
Yeah, especially with schools being somewhat evenly distributed around cities - this could really help with coverage. I’ve only read about Meshtastic but I recall it’s extremely low bandwidth so that would be a problem for the little dissidents.
Please. Turn every school into a node in the network
Of course we could just have schools that don’t blow so hard you want to tune it out and am electronics club but since we apparently hate kids they gotta invent their way around censorship
Yeah I bet they’re going to figure out mandatory education that’s more interesting and fun than chatting with your friends and playing games. Lol
If they practiced teaching the way these students should have practiced telling time, this wouldn’t be surprising
The poor sods probably think time is quantized. But that’s philosophically impossible, because that means time is like frames in a movie, but if time consist of a series of still frames, how do we get from one point in time to the next, and how do particles remember their direction or frequency?
Ergo time must be linear, but that too is philosophically impossible, because that creates problems with infinities. Meaning the theory of time must be incomplete as infinity is considered to be outside the valid range of a physics theory.
So time can be neither quantized or linear, but what other options are there?
I’ll just have to acknowledge that just as Socrates realized, all I know is that I know nothing. I’m just very very confused, just like those students are over an old analogue clock.
Our theory of time (more specifically spacetime) is incomplete. Some theory’s suggest it is a continuum while others suggest it is quantised. But as this discrepancy applies only at the Planck scale it is somewhat moot to how we experience time: our experience of time is linear and continuous. However clock is necessarily quantised but that is simply because it measures the passage of time in discrete steps. A clock is not time itself.
our experience of time is linear
Absolutely.
A clock is not time itself.
Except if time is an emerging property of causality, then maybe it kind of is. Since all clocks are based on the causality that causes time to exist.
I love this take because it’s the kind of thing only a handful of teenagers would ever think about, let alone understand, yet it speaks to an effect that underlies them all.
It’s the kind of thing I’d say and people would go, “You’re overthinking it.” No, no if anything, you’re underthinking it. Just because the idea doesn’t occur to someone else doesn’t mean it’s not a valid extension of the thought. So it is here, with a train of thought that deviates from expectation, but that leaves one pondering nonetheless.
Time is a funny thing. If current theory holds through, it means that a photon traveling at the speed of light experiences everything in the same instant. It makes looking up at ancient stars feel all the more incredible, thinking that the photon that hits your retina already “experienced” that moment when it was first emitted millions of years ago.
thinking that the photon that hits your retina already “experienced” that moment when it was first emitted millions of years ago.
I never thought of it that way, but yes that must be the logical conclusion. Time is indeed a funny thing, but when I think of it as causality, it kind of makes sense.
“analog” <> “old-fashioned”. Analog clocks are very common out in the world. Analog watches even more so, they’re the norm not the exception among people with an interest in watches. My take-away from this story is that 1) these schools are not teaching kids to read analog clocks, and 2) these schools have installed digital clocks rather than analog.
Both of these things are easy to remedy.
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Analog clocks are not “common” out in the world. Not where these kids are.
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people with an interest in watches are a small percentage of people with watches. And most are “boomers” who don’t actually have an interest in watches beyond as a status symbol.
AFAIK there is a wall clock in every classroom, for a start.
Not sure where else kids go these days. But I work part time as a ski chaperone and there’s a huge clock at the ski resort you can see from the ski hill, and other clocks at the pool where the swim team is, and at the gym, and by the library at the town center.
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I think every school I’ve ever been in had an analog clock in every room, but:
- The “learning time” unit comes and goes in grade 1/2, and teachers might drop the practice shortly thereafter (while teachers of other grades abdicate responsibility)
- Students eventually go home, where there may be no analog clocks.
- Seeing clocks in public is also becoming rare, and it’s not uncommon to see a once-working historical time-piece become neglected and no longer working
Another interesting thing, at least around me, is that audible “time-striking” on the hour seems like it might outlast all the large public clocks. I believe the vast majority of them are now digitally operated and emitted over a loudspeaker instead of being a mechanical system hooked up to an analogue clock with actual bells. It kind of makes sense, because that can be automated and requires far less maintenance and resources than a mechanical system or human bellringer.
Seeing clocks in public is also becoming rare
Is it? I hadn’t noticed but I’m probably not looking for clocks in the wild much either. I can think of one big quasi-public space (my YMCA gym) that has nothing but analog clocks up high on the walls. I could speculate that analog is easier than digital to read from a distance, or that large digital clocks designed to be read from a distance are more expensive than analog or hard to find, but I wouldn’t think either of these would be true.
There are wall clocks all over my life too, and especially at the swimming pool and the ski hill it is way easier to have an analog clock than a huge bright wall clock. (The pool has those too, but for pace clocks not for the time of day.)
they’re the norm not the exception among people with an interest in watches.
Watches stopped being interesting to anyone except watch nerds by the 1980s or so, when they all became electronic except for very niche mechanical ones.
Also camp counselors.
Also a lot of the clocks are broken but we still blame phones even after we banned them
Google “what is a scapegoat”
What a great time to learn!
Next they’ll be surprised to find that they don’t know long division, cursive writing or 6502 assembly language
These schools don’t even teach kids base-8 math. Disgusting.
Tbh I think teaching 6502 assembly would be a great idea. You can learn the basics of how computers work without having to deal with all the complexity of a computer from 2026.
It’s better to use an AVR for that. 6502 was a ridiculous kludge for the sake of slightly improved code density.
What is AVR?
8 bit MCU series popularized by the Arduino a decade or two ago. Kind of obsolete now but still has some uses and attractions.
Is there a such thing as an intentionally simplified assembly language, perhaps one that targets a VM, for ease of development and learning purposes? Like the assembly equivalent of Lua, I guess.
There is TIS-100 by Zachtronics but I don’t think that counts.
Yeah anything not too complex will work. We had to implement a PIC simulator in university, I thought that was a great exercise too.
Although 6502 actually was my first assembly language.
6502 assembly language
Z80 would be good too. The kids should be able to implement the instruction set on a breadboard by intuition alone. There’s something wrong with the teachers and Big School if the kids don’t have it running CP/M by the end of the school year, preferably with a working port of Hack.
Exactly. I’m wondering how many of those teachers could use a slide rule or even an abacus. We’re far enough along now that I bet the majority of teachers would also be lost when confronted with a log table or a topo map and a compass.
Astrolabe and sextant? They’d be totally lost.
I bet most teachers don’t know how to saddle a horse, card and spin wool and flax by hand, or even use a clutch on a manual transmission vehicle, either.
[edit] Ooh… thought of another one! I bet none of the children know how to use a rotary phone either. (In fact, since POTS has been fully DTMF for over 20 years, I doubt a dial phone would actually function today without a converter).
And yet, we still have analog clocks all around us. Seems to me we should know his to use them… Unlike a sextant.
Still, knowing what those things are and how they work just might be useful if something similar becomes important for some reason.
Those things should be known by at least enough of the population to bring them back and use them if everything goes apocalyptic.
If things start falling apart, I’m throwing in with the Amish.
Learning to read analogue clocks also helps provide some foundational learning for circular geometry - being able to quickly identify relevant segments of a circle and their respective fractions (5 minutes = 1/12 = 30° = π/6 rad etc.) helps build towards being able to compute circular geometric problems more easily in later years.
Its good to know how to grow a turnip as a fallback skill.
And raise a barn
Turnips more or less grow themselves, but raising a barn without modern cordless tools and truss plates requires a lot of the skills we should be lamenting the loss of. Hand saws, hand planes, handmade nails (that are expensive), hand sharpening and sanding… there’s more to building a barn than growing a field of turnips is all I’m sayin.
Indeed, and even the turnips require soil that helps them grow. The Amish are experts at land management without chemicals. We take such poor care of our land that most nonprofessional farming will take years of land work just to get a useful yield.
I remember we were taught a segment on how to use an abacus and how they worked, because it demonstrated certain mathematical principles. Of course I don’t remember now how to use one, but I’m sure that visual demonstration of the mathematical concepts helped us as we were learning math. In the same way, learning about analog clocks at a young age would probably help with learning about geometry/trigonometry, angles and degrees, arcs, etc.
Youth of today are a failure. They neither show the initiative to adopt new and improved practices the way we broke from those of our parents’ generation, nor the wisdom to recognize that our generation’s ways are the correct ones and should be followed to the letter.
Youth of today are some of the most forward thinking empathetic no nonsense people around.
I love the younger generations, their compassion and humanity is leagues ahead of their predecessors.
Anyone who shits on them is a failure.
I worry about some things but I do like the activism I’m seeing
Yeah, I share your view. I wish that the youth of today could have grown up in a better world than I did, but unfortunately for most, that’s not the case. Sure, there are some things that are better, but by and large, young people are facing so much hard stuff. In spite of that (and perhaps even because of that), I have seen so many of them who are deeply caring and engaged in politics.
You have to be paying attention to this one. An /s would have been a good idea.
Don’t mind the people who can’t get a joke, I thought this was funny.
When I was a kid, we had whole educational units on this. Like with a special demonstration clock and worksheets and everything.
How are kids supposed to learn if schools don’t teach them?
Parents?
All these kids are gonna fail their dementia tests in 60 years. 😝
(Yes that’s how it long it takes psychologists to update stuff, they still give out psych testers from the 1940s for stuff like custody evaluations)
Heh, I’m early Gen X bordering on boomer and as a kid I found it a lot harder to read the time on an analog clock as opposed to the Casio digital wristwatch I had.
Of course I could “decode” the clock, but it was not intuitive.
It literally is a harder format. One is literally just numbers and another is a chart. Anyone can read text but everyone needs to learn how to read a chart at least once.
I was frustrated that I couldn’t quickly and accurately read the time - Ie: it’s 1:23 rn, if I was looking at an analog clock, depending on the activity, I’d round either up or down. I found the minutes too small to read, and 90% of the time rounding was good enough.
