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New York teachers stunned to learn some students can’t read time on old clocks after phone ban comes into play
(www.independent.co.uk)
What a great time to learn!
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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I am 20 and I still remember newspapers and TV talking about "teenagers these days can't read clocks" since I can remember. it seems nobody has ever known
You make it sound like you’re old 😂
Yeah I graduated high school in 2019 and some of my classmates had a hard time reading analog clocks, in private schools lmao. It's definitely has increased with Covid and smart phones but kids who don't want to learn never do.
'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.
It takes just a few minutes to learn how to read an analog clock. Once you've got the idea, you'll be slow deciphering the time at first, but once you start doing it, very quickly you'll be reading it immediately with just a glance.
I see analog clocks all over the place, especially waiting rooms and public buildings, and I have a very nice pretty one in my house. I think the people saying they're not being used anymore just aren't noticing them, they're just background scenery to them and don't enter their consciousness.
30 yo and tbh not sure I really know how to read it right.
The little (shorter) hand points to the hour, the big (longer) hand points to the minutes. That's pretty much it. And of course the hands move clockwise.
edit: I should also note that for reading the hour, the number the hour hand points to is the number of the hour, but for reading the minutes, each number counts as 5 minutes. There are usually dots between the numbers--each dot is 1 minute. So between the 12 and the 1 is 5 minutes, 1 to 2 is 5 more minutes, so the minute hand pointing to the 2 means 10 minutes after the hour.
I like thinking of the minutes in quarters and halves, "Its a quarter after 6pm" ≈ 1/4 * 60min is 15mins, so its 6:15pm. "Its 10 to seven" ≈ 60 - 10 is 50mins, so its 6:50. Idk unless its a timed activity I usually just round the clock to the higher number divisible by 5 "7:33" becomes "7:35"
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?
Still not teaching about taxes... or anything useful, clearly.
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.
Judging by the stories my mom has after teaching for decades they no longer really teach anything. Nor are they allowed to. These days they have to follow a script for everything down to how you move your hands and when.
Disruptive student? Just keep teaching like nothings going on.
Student struggling with a subject? Don't stop to help or try a different method to help them learn. No child left behind so they'll still move up a grade even if they can't read or do simple addition.
Just make sure the students are in the classroom so the school gets money. Nothing else matters.
... Not doing that anymore? Because they're very rare and you can easily get by without it most of the time
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.
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.
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.
Ok by why does this matter. Most people can't read a sundial either?
There's concern that young people have very poorly developed analog knowledge. Humans usually learn better by combining sensory inputs, such as learning better by writing things down or tying things to memories. Smells famously tie into memories very well. By only typing, and having very little connections to the real world in the context of learning, there is the fear that they will learn less and also not be able to learn, since they are lacking those sensory connections. They also have horrible handwriting, probably spelling as well due to autocorrect. This is practically not a problem, but if the next generations grow up not knowing "how to language", that is probably not ideal.
We don't really use sundials still. We still use analog clocks though because they're efficient and if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Not only that but Technology Connections got me thinking about analog clocks in a whole new way.
If it's 1:40 and you know you gotta leave in half an hour, you don't need to know that you need to leave at 2:10...just 'when the big hand does half a lap from now'.
It's better for visualizing time, if that makes sense?
I think of it like pizza time, I have this big a slice until something happens or I have to be somewhere or whatever
Most likely more digital then analog clocks these days. I can read analog but I cant remember the last time I needed. Besides the both do the same job but one is quicker and more accessible.
People are really scared of change but just because something is new doesn't mean it's bad.
That depends. People have different brains. If you've got dyscalculia, analog is probably easier.
It's a lot more effort to take down working analog clocks and replace them with digital ones; the analog clocks we've got on towers and all aren't going anywhere.
I don't think it's always a fear of change. Sometimes it's just comfort in the familiar.
No need to take them down, eventually they will need to be replaced and most people have a phone or a digital watch anyway. It's just not super priority. I think reading comprehension should be a higher concern
Agreed, it's a gradual process. I would be inclined to agree, but there still is a sizable watch heads population, even among younger folks, so who knows.
Definitely, literacy is key. What decades of defunding the humanities and liberal arts does...
Plus when it is broke it still works a couple times per day.
Good thing they are in that place where all the professional teacher are.
I've been hearing this since I was a kid, though back then they just blamed the use of digital clocks instead of phones.
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Some might call this a "teachable moment ", no?
Exactly my thought. Not only are you getting the opportunity to teach a skill that had not previously been taught, but you are also able to help kids better understand the concept of time and why we use certain words to define time. Win win.
It's wild to think that, "It's a quarter to 8," must be a mental exercise for some people. That is, instead of having an immediate understanding from being able to glance at an analog clock and think, "That's clearly 1/4 of an hour," it instead relies on a cognitive exercise that requires a knowledge of division and subtraction (60 divided by 4, then subtract the result from 60.)
Though I tend to think of time spatially, in part due to being raised with analog clocks. They're much easier for me to read and understand at a glance without having to process much. Reading a digital clock requires converting it to analog in my mind, because the spatial appearance of the hands is what my brain makes sense of. I sometimes hear from people who can't do that though, who instead have to convert the analog to digital in their minds. Which is fine, it just sounds much more "mathy" to me and like it takes more work than making sense of shapes. But to each their own.
Next they’ll be surprised to find that they don’t know long division, cursive writing or 6502 assembly language
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(11 replies)
“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!
They actually gave us a number but gave it to us on a abacus and now we can't comprehend it.
Stunned, I tell you!
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