I know someone said more or less the same thing when it was posted on Tumblr, but if the schools realize most of their students don’t know a thing they should know… Shouldn’t they teach it?
its not in their standardized tests and that’s the only thing that determines funding. Its a nightmare …
Apparently it’s literally in the standardised tests… that’s what’s causing the problems! 😉
Yes.
But they don’t need to know it. So they stopped teaching it.
Honestly, how often do you read analog clocks?
I mean, I learned it as a child, but it’s been probably months since I actually had the need to read an analog clock, and I’m just not used to it anymore. I have to think about it, 20 years ago it was just my spine doing the thinking and it felt effortless.
Every day?
A lot, since I have an analog wristwatch and a wall clock. There were also analog clocks in several of the exam rooms where I last had exams.
I guess many people don’t use them regularly, but regardless, the simple fact that they still exist is enough to be worth learning about them. Not everything you learn at school is meant to be used every single day.
Daily. There’s one in my kitchen and one at my office.
Every day? I use an analog watch face on my smartwatch, I have an analog clock in my car, I have another couple at home….
So what? I don’t.
I don’t have a smart watch and hardly anybody I know actually owns some analog clock?
Take a look around you. Where are any analog clocks? Church towers, train stations, old people. That’s pretty much it. Your smartwatch is a choice. You could just as well use a digital watch face. There is literally no benefit in that case - except your personal preference.
You literally asked “Honestly, how often do you read analog clocks?” and I answered. And then you say “So what?” So why did you even ask if you were gonna turn around and belittle answers?
It’s called rhetorical question.
I’d argue that you are a very small minority. Most people under 50 probably barely have any analog clocks around.
I disagree, I am under 50 and wear an analog wristwatch every day, but if I want to know the time I just look on my phone.
Most people under 50 probably barely have any analog clocks around.
Every home/apt of every under 40 year old person I have ever been in has had at least one analog clock. And most have had several.
Also, grandfather clocks are a thing. And they’re gorgeous.
Extremely anti-social to act like digital clocks are better - similar to acting like social media and Facetime calls are in any way superior to irl face-to-face interaction - as our current loneliness epidemic demonstrates
So since you don’t use something no one should learn it? Crap take.
I actually agree with you. I can read an analog clock, but what worth is the skill? Most clocks are digital, and it gives me nothing more to read an analog one. People downvoting you is just silly. Some skills are allowed to die out if they add no value in modern life.
Someone else made a comment and I think it’s great so imma plagiarize it-
If kids are taught to read an analog clock early, which isn’t very hard to learn, they are getting a leg up on fractions, percentages, and geometry.
I don’t actually believe this is true.
It rather, I imagine that they could get an even greater leg up if that time was spent teaching something else
I wonder how many people feel this way about writing when everyone just types/texts everything.
There are fewer and fewer applications for writing, but it’s still more important than reading an analog clock.
How so?
I genuinely don’t understand the clock-face-reading-is-a-useless-skill opinion so both seem equally important to me.
Fair enough. Most people don’t encounter analog clocks anymore. And many of us have smart watches or phones where we check the time. Since I have a non-analog watch, I don’t find I ever look at analog clocks anymore. If it’s in a room, I just don’t notice it. Growing up, it was important to know, but now I just never have a use for it. Learning is important, but there are so many more interesting and useful things to learn.
You could also make an argument about automatic or manual cars. Sure, we could teach our kids how to drive manual, but why? Most cars are automatic. If they want to have a manual car, they can learn. Otherwise it’s just a useless skill.
Yea that’s kind of what I was thinking when I said eventually handwriting will go the same way.
If people never encounter it and do all their writing on keyboards, it’ll eventually be a useless skill as well.
It’s not just about telling time though. It’s about representing things in a different way. Correlating one thing to another, and making someone think until the representation automatically becomes the output. You are forced to see things in a different way, which is what learnding is all about.
Learning how a sundial works would teach them more than leaning how an analog clock works, in that regard.
That is a good point, but analog clocks are IMHO in the realm of sundial clocks or audio casettes or floppy discs. Technology that was once usefull, but now it’s replaced by better alternatives. Time is after all just a number, and it does not matter how we choose to represent it.
Digital isn’t better it’s just different. Also a tonne of wristwatches are still analogue.
It absolutely is tho. Usually more precise, 1:1 translatable into written text, can use the superior 24h system and uses the same reading system that is already taught in school anyways.
Right! Just to prove a point, I am going to make an NTP enabled rolex, and sync it to my microsecond accurate local NTP server! :P
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Yeah, but you need to factor in the distance to the transmitter. Going to add at least a few microseconds to your time accuracy!
“Ususally more precise” > This depends on how precisely it is set, not on the display. Unless it’s a connected watch, but then it’s much more expensive and less energy efficient.
“1.1 translatable into written text” > Both are, you’re reading the same number
“Uses the superior 24h system” > Adding 12 to a number isn’t complicated. And with habit, most people who use analog watches and the 24h system know which position of the needle means what number in 24h format without doing the math. Some clocks don’t even have digits. Unless you’ve been sedated and woke up in a room without windows, you’ll know which side of 12 you’re on. And otherwise, you’ve got more pressing issues.
There’s nothing stopping an analog clock face from representing 24h time:
🤢 what an utter abomination
This is why puppies die
I was ready to hate it but after a good look, it doesn’t look that bad. Doesn’t work for small wristwatches but could look nice for a big wall clock.
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I used to have one, but now I set my phone clock to be displayed as an analogue clock so that kind of made it obsolete, since it now has all the benefits of an analogue display with the additional advantage of automatically syncing time and adjusting for time zones and daylight saving time.
I wear a watch for the time. I like it more than using my phone.
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Wristwatches are just jewelry at this point tbh. They’ve been rendered completely redundant by cell phones. The only people under 60 who wear them are doing so as a fashion statement.
I’m sure a lot of wristwatch stans will downvote me but I don’t care I’m still right
Watches are just more convenient. You don’t need to carry a phone everywhere and with texts and calls showing on the watch you don’t need to find your phone to check.
I use my watch with alarms/ timers to know when I need to clock out or in from lunch etc while I mostly leave my phone at my desk while at work so if I’m walking around the building I still get my alerts through my watch
Watches that can get alerts can show digital time. So, chalk another point up for not learning analog time.
Knowing a clock is more than just telling time.
When you’re walking with your homies you gotta be able to call out “gyat 3 o’clock” , so your fellow bros know where to look.
Absolutely not comparable to floppy disks. The hands are a representation, not a technology. Technology-wise, most modern “analog” wristwatches are quartz, and therefore digital, not actually analog. Yet we choose to make them with hands because that provides a better representation of the passing of time.
Technology-wise, most modern “analog” wristwatches are quartz, and therefore digital, not actually analog.
Wat… that’s not how that works. Quartz watches can be digital or analog but what matters is whether it has a digital display or analog hands.
Always feels like these articles (and headlines in particular) are made to stir up division on social media.
I don’t believe this for a second. You can literally just look at it and intuitively understand. Not to mention part of the standard elementary school curriculum is how to read a clock.
Wait…you think those are intuitive? Fuck no.
Who’s going to intuitively know that “long hand pointing at 2” means “10 minutes after the hour”? Also, having the long hand for minutes is super unintuitive when hours are longer than minutes.
May not be super intuitive, but getting rid of them is intellectually lazy. If you know an hour is 60 minutes, it makes enough sense.
If an hour is 60 minutes, 60/12 is 5 minutes per number on the clock. Long hand is minutes because there are more minutes in a day than hours. Or at least that’s how I can rationalize it.
If you can explain an analog clock that quickly, it’s just lazy for them to not learn it. It also has cross application to make people more comfortable with mental math and multiples commonly seen in trigonometry.
Minutes are the smaller time division with 60 possible values so that hand is longer to reach to the tick marks for easier reading of the exact minute.
The hour hand only needs to distinguish between 12 possible values that are more spread out around the perimeter, so it doesn’t need to reach very far to tell which hour out of 12 it is.
Real reason is probably that the schools don’t have the budget to pay for the batteries, or for someone to make sure the time is correct on all of them in the school…
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In that case the rats probably ate the wires and they can’t afford to repair it… 😅
Shouldnt we blame the teachers for fsiling to teach kids how to read the clock?
Or the schools for removing the clocks, thus preventing anyone from practicing.
Brain rot is only a moral failing of the children. What more can the teachers and parents do?!
bruh I can read analogue clocks and I’m gen z. it’s probably rage bait though, so who cares :/
it’s not rage bait, I’ve seen it happen plenty of times
I know, it’s just a meme, but… The article. It’s about clocks during exams specifically, when students are under pressure and more likely to misread the time on an analogue clock.
Thanks for expounding upon that. It’s shit like this that gets spread around and older gens pat themselves on the back while shaking their head at the younger gen for not knowing something, despite it being taken out of context or even straight up false.
To be honest, even if it were completely true… okay? If analogue clocks are on the way out then there’s no particular need for anyone to be able to read them any more. I like them a lot visually and have a couple in my home, but there’s nothing so special about them that people would be missing out by using digital clocks instead
Well, there sort of is https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag?si=eWRyU6pjV71_ag8N
With all due respect this is literally just a guy saying that he’s personally better at reading analogue clocks than digital ones for 18 minutes
I mean that’s kind of the point, right? They convey the information in a different way that’s easy to understand for some people which seems pretty relevant since conveying information is the only function of a clock. Probably the ideal solution would be to just have both in classrooms
I immediately thought of Technology connections based on that description. I didn’t even remember he did a video on clocks.
yeah I mean I don’t know how to use a slide rule but my older brother learned on it a bit. OMG Xers don’t know how to use slide rules and are dependent on elctronic calculators.
Kids cant ask the teacher for the time?
At my school, because the clock was always between 2 and 10 minutes wrong, the students(mostly me) would just raise their hands and ask how much time they have left
they could ask the teacher, sure, but why not fix the problem instead of using a disruptive workaround until the end of time? phrased another way, should we as a society fix problems or provide half solutions that don’t fully resolve them?
IMO all the more reason to keep them. In the real world we all have to perform under pressure. With practice they can learn to read the clock under pressure, maybe take a breath or two and slow down before trying to read it. It may be a simple hurdle to overcome but practicing overcoming these things is important for development.
You’re right it’s good to prepare young people for challenges. Still, that should mean challenges that would come up anyways, not artificially making things more difficult.
It’s good to know how to read an analog clock, just like it’s good to be able to read cursive. But both of them are outdated and aren’t inherently required in day to day life. Inserting them into a testing situation that’s meant to test something else is creating an unnecessary challenge.
Not to mention the amount of analog clocks that are just wrong. I work at a fortune 500 company, most clocks are digital and synced to a time server. Every analog clock is wrong. Just yesterday I walked through the cafeteria and glanced at the clock and it read 5:20… For a second I panicked and was like it can’t be that late. I checked my phone, it was 3:06. The clock was just not set properly.
There are radio controlled clocks which theoretically shouldn’t be wrong. At least as long as there isn’t a battery or motor issue…
How do you tell whether you’re looking at a radio-controlled clock though?
How would you tell you’re looking at a synchronized digital clock or cheap battery model?
Sometimes they have it written on the clockface. I don’t think that’s a general rule though.
In the same way there are digital clocks that can be wrong too though.
There are tons of equipment and tools out there that very closely resemble an analog clock and require the same skills. Pressure gauges for example. These skills are not out dated.
Except, a pressure gage reads the number it’s pointing at. Not 1 hand means the number it’s pointing at and the other means 5 times the most recent digit passed plus 1 for each tick mark.
I’d wager that most people would never even see a pressure gage with two hands. Dual-indicating double-bourdon tube differential pressure gages are quite rare in the real world. Usually for that kind of application you’d go digital.
If only they still taught how to read a sundial, but those damn new fangled analog clocks…
This has got to be rage bait like the litterbox thing right?
Yup. Of course it is and half of the comment section is falling for it.
Litter box thing? I thought it was just my half wit town who believed in that bullshit.
My mother in law informed me that the left wants kids to have access to litter boxes and all kinds of stuff. She swears her friend said it’s true. I told her to her face that she’s been duped but you know she’s a bit too far and drank the juice.
So many edgelords in the comments shit talking younger generations for learning different things.
Y’all sound like old farts crying about how schools stopped using slide rules and how modern music just isn’t as good.I think keeping analog tech along side the digital equivalent is probably a good idea, just in case. Plus learning varied systems makes for more adaptable and smarter people.
There is some truth to that, but this doesn’t seem like the thing to focus on, if that’s the goal. Surely there is a better subject to fulfill those needs.
Like… If we all forgot how to keep time, and we had to invent a new system of time keeping… Surely we could do better than what we have now.
You sound like someone who doesn’t know how to read an analoge clock.
I bet you could figure it out if you looked it up. And you would be better for it ❤️
Probably not. I can read an analogue clock and I am no better or worse for it.
What? Of course you are better off for it. You know how to read time more than one way.
In what way am I better off for being able to read time in more than one way?
Imagine life in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. All electronic devices have been rendered useless due to the EMPs from all the nuclear blasts. You, with your unfathomable ability to tell the time from an old wind-up clock, are viewed as a literal god among men (and women)
In what way am I better off being able to read cyrilic as well as latin script? Truly a dilemma of a century.
Jokes on you, because just that you learned to read analogue clocks, makes your brain more plastic. I am sure you know what that word means, but for anyone else, plastic means adaptable. The more things you learn the easier it is to learn more things.
LMAO yeah right. If it wasn’t for learning to tell analogue time, I wouldn’t have had enough brain plasticity to finish college, oh thank god for being able to tell round time. I think you might need to keep chipping away at your own brain plasticity friendo because I don’t think learning analogue time was enough for you.
You sound like one of those edgelords who acts like grumpy old men who cry at young people for doing things differently.
I bet you could stop talking and everyone would like you better ♥️
No publisher, no byline, no way to know what the source of the claim is coming from.
But they did include a bit of meme art, so it seems indisputable.
OK let’s have a lesson for those who find this difficult. First, remember that little kids pick this up quickly and easily, so you can too!
We all know there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, right? and that the day is divided into the a.m. of 12 hours and the p.m. of 12 hours.
So analog clocks show those 12 hours as the numbers 1-12 evenly spaced around the clock face. Now look a little closer and you see it’s also divided into 60 marks with a tick mark for each of the 60 seconds/minute or 60 minutes/hour. Hang on, we’re almost there!
The little hand points to the HOUR number (1-12). If it’s in between two numbers, that means the time is in between those two hours.
The big hand points to the MINUTE tick mark. Notice that the 1-12 numbers coincide with each 5th tick mark so it’s easy to count them. Just count by 5’s! So if the big hand is between the 3 and the 4, that means the minute of the hour is between 15 and 20, look at which tick mark for the exact minute.
Now, can you figure out how the second hand works? Good! Kindergarten dismissed!
/s
I can tell the time perfectly well unless someone asks me what time it is. Then my brain is completely useless and I just have to twist my wrist around awkwardly to show them.
I’m a millenial and I can read analog clocks, but it takes me a few seconds, it’s not as instant as with digital ones.
Especially when they have no numbers.
Sounds like divisive bullshit.
After all the millennial horseshit we had to hear in the 2010’s and we’re just gonna turn around and do the same shit, huh?
Yup, hating on the next generation is a tale as old as time. Idk why, but every generation seems to do it. Maybe it’s being uncomfortable with them being different or afraid of their youthfulness. I don’t get it.
“Gen-z is killing the analog clock industry” news articles incoming
I’m not gonna do that, fuck that. I do hope this much screen time is ok for kids, even as a young programmer I didn’t have an iPad everywhere. Nobody seems concerned about their privacy, but guess what: neither did my millennial peers.
I think everything will be ok with alpha and Z. Let’s not repeat our the mistakes of our parents.
Analog clocks are kind of annoying tbh. Sometimes you need that little extra energy you have to spend on wondering whether it is 11:37 or 11:38 already by carefully visually bisecting the circle section between 7 and 8.
Millimetres of white space keep you wondering about the nature of analogue vs digital, discrete vs continuous and measurement uncertainty while you have better things to do but cannot just give up on OCDing whether it is exactly 11:37:30 already or maybe it is 11:37:35? And boom in these seconds you were wondering it is already pointless because it is the past and now it is time to wonder if it is 11:38:15 or 11:38:30Whereas for digital it is just:
oh it is 11:11 on 11.11.11, how cool, life’s goodThus it is my opinion that analogue clocks are virgins whereas digital are chads
I read both kinds of clocks differently and have to sit and process to translate between them. A digital clock I read as “six twenty-five AM.” An analog clock I read as “almost half-past six.” I usually don’t bother reading an analog clock at greater resolutions than a quarter hour.
No.
I love having an analog clock. It makes it feel like you have more time compared to a digital clock, making me more relaxed. For example, if the time is 12:34 PM, my subconscious will think, “Ahh, shit, 26 more minutes before 1 PM.” But with an analog clock, I read it as around half an hour before 1 PM. The visual representation also helps, like seeing that there is a distance that the hands need to travel to reach a certain time.
All in all, I very much prefer having analog clocks vs digital when given the chance.
The specific time isn’t as important as how long it is until things are going down. You know the part of the clock the minute hand will be pointing at when it’s time to do shit then you got a handy little progress arc to check in on and instantly know when it’s time to do the things.
So you say that your bowel movements are synchronised with your clock?
Kinda. Finishing my coffee is synchronized with the clock. I take a shit soon after that.
seconds hand: am I a joke to you?
Most clocks have only two hands. Actually all school clocks I seen had only two
There’s a huge difference between “most clocks” and “most clocks I’ve seen” - especially if your clock experience is restricted to schools.
Do you see a lot of schools? Do you know whether the schools you’ve been to all use the same supplier? How broad is your school clock experience? How many clocks do you think you’ve seen, ever?
Most clocks I’ve seen recently (I can recall exactly 1) have seconds hands. Regardless though I’m not suggesting “most clocks” have seconds hands…I’m just making a quip about how traditional, analogue, clocks have seconds hands to deal with the exact problems noted.
And yet in schools they don’t have seconds. Never had
I still have ptsd thanks to that. Can you imagine? No seconds?
This is pure torture that should be forbidden by Geneva convention. So uncivilised
I cannot fathom such deep despair for I only live in a world of seconds.
God speed my simple friend. God speed.
Yeah we had a problem with the seconds hand in scools, too many students keep starting at them and we all know that if you stare at them time stops …
I don’t think this precision is necessary. We have an analog clock in our living room, and I often quickly glance at it to get a feeling for time. I don’t care if it is 11:35 or 11:36, I just think “Oh, it’s half past eleven”. At a train station, when seconds count, analog clocks are a dumb idea. However, then I also have my (digital) watch.
Who cares. Analog audio, video, phones, all out the window. Next people will be complaining people don’t even know anything about vacuum tubes. Digital clocks are easier to read and make more fuckin sense. Leave the kids alone. 🙄🙄🙄
If only there was a building children could attend where they do things like teach how clocks work
Seriously! I’m pretty sure that was part of 1st or 2nd grade. Maybe both…
The problem is unless you really use the skill a lot you’re not really gonna learn it from school. I had to teach myself how to read analog clocks in highschool cause even though I’m pretty sure I learned it in elementary school I grew up with computers and eventually smart phones so I never had to use it.
Edit: Also for context I was born in 2001
We had one in every classroom. So we only had to look at it for reinforcement of the original lesson.
We had them too but at least for me in elementary school I didn’t really care what time it was. I remember I knew what position on the clock meant school was done but other then that didn’t really need to read it cause the teachers would just bring us as a class to whatever our next class was for that day. By the time I got old enough to start caring smartphones were prevalent enough that I never really needed to learn how to read a clock. It wasn’t until highschool where teachers got more strict about enforcing no phones out in class that I then learned how to read clocks so I could know when class would be done.
