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.
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
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 hate this shit, ofc they don’t know, who was planning to teach them? certainly not the fucking schools imposing this shit.
“Numerous students”
Gotta love that completely nebulous and undefined number. It also sounds like a non-zero number simply have to be instructed to read the clock in order to understand it. Could be like 20 kids out of a school of 400. Oh noes the education system has completely failed!
If only there was a place they could learn that.
‘Old clocks’? You mean… analog clocks? The ones in practically every household outside of America?
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?
in practically every household outside of America?
Is this actually the case anymore?
Outside of america ,explain more
It’s not that stunning, they didn’t grow up with them and you don’t really see them in public these days.
We explicitly learned analog clocks in 1st grade, had worksheets and everything. What the hell are schools doing these days?
People forget skills they don’t use. I’m guessing you and I had plenty of practice reading analog clocks over the years until the skill became completely ingrained.
Yeah, it reminds me of languages. I learned French to a pretty high level in high school (I was a try hard whose brain clicked well with languages), but over the last decade, I have rarely used those skills and I was recently shocked to realise how much my knowledge had atrophied. It’s easy to become complacent once you feel you have learned something, but you use it or you lose it.
Yup. I learned cursive in the 2nd or 3rd grade. Probably the last time I used it as well. If I needed to write something in cursive, I would be pretty screwed. I remember some of the easier stuff, like the vowels. But if I needed to write a “q” or “k” I don’t think I could remember it.
With that said, learning how to read an analog clock is way easier. It’s a formula/method, and the numbers are right there. It’s not memorization. This should be something easy to teach.
The problem is that analog clocks are not in the curriculum for middle school and high school. It’s hard to find time to teach middle schoolers how to read clocks when you are struggling through “To Kill a Mockingbird” with a bunch of students on a 4th grade reading level.
Teenagers in inner city schools not knowing how to read analog clocks is a much more complicated issue than it seems on the surface. The solution is not “well they should have just had the childhood that I had and it wouldn’t be a problem”
It helped that every school in the district ran analog clocks exclusively, so you had to learn it if you wanted to know what time it was at school.
Still not teaching about taxes… or anything useful, clearly.
I work in schools. We have them in every hallway and classroom. But the kids do not know how to read them, and they don’t even seem interested to learn even though it would take all of two minutes to wrap their head around. Seen it in the middle and high schools.
Some might call this a "teachable moment ", no?
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
It’s almost like you gotta teach people how to do things, that people aren’t just inherently born with all the knowledge to survive. Crazy I know.
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.
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?
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.
This isn’t interesting
Good thing they are in that place where all the professional teacher are.
This is so silly. Kids can’t read an analog clock? Teach them. This isn’t personal finance or cursive writing, you can teach them to read a clock in an afternoon.
Kids today are too stupid to intuit things their parents had to be shown. Shocking.
I used to get this as a kid, this would have been about 1990 when I was 6 and at no point did anybody realise IT WAS BECAUSE NO-ONE TAUGHT ME, after that my mom spent an evening explaining it to me and after that I was fine. This is why I hate those videos where they give kids retro tech and laugh at them for not knowing how to use them, despite never being shown them before.
They should do those videos but give them an hour or two to mess around with it first, observe the results.
“Old clocks”?
Those are just clocks
It’s a bit scary that anything children were once expected to learn has now become “the calculator”. When calculators first came out the cry was ‘why do we need to learn to do math any more when this device can do it for us?’ Computers continued that trend. Smart phones even more so. It is a part of history that is hard to understand, how did a former, reasonably advanced civilization lose its advanced skills? We might be watching in real time how it happens. Except this time it is us, not an ancient civ.
Experienced software devs and tradesmen know this pain all too well. Frameworks and widgets make it easy to do stuff quickly, but no one knows how it works under the hood any more.
