NYC Phone Ban Reveals Some Students Can't Read Clocks

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…

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.

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.

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What benefit is there to keep this antiquated method around, aside from just as an historical reference?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.

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.

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?

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..

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

> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said.

I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading can be taught and learned in probably an hour.

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".

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?

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?

> 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...

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?

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?

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

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 hour to read the hour hand but not the minute or second hands. Illusion of competence or illusion of depth or something.

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 an interesting area.

Even though you can make sense of the time just by the hour hand, I still take a dumb amount of time to 'read' it because I have to look at both

this reminds me of learning cursive