I can understand that students today might have difficulty reading clocks with hands and the numbers arranged around the edge of a circle. They see digital timepieces much more frequently.
I can't understand the response of some schools to remove the old-fashioned clocks and replace them with digital ones. My lack of understanding grows from two sources:
1) Once upon a time, even those of us who lived prior to the digital clock era didn't know how to read clocks with hands. Although I can't remember exactly when it was, I have an image of a teacher moving hands around a brightly-colored clock face and asking us to tell her what time that showed, and also of a test that had pictures of clocks set to different times.
2) Aren't schools the places where people LEARN THINGS THEY DON'T HAPPEN TO ALREADY KNOW?!?!?!?!?! Because if the story at the link is correct, some schools in Merrie Olde England, when confronted with students who lack knowledge, don't even think about, oh, TEACHING THEM. Nope, they just consider student ignorance too high a mountain to climb, something we'll just have to learn to live with.
How about the counter-argument, that students would simply be wasting time in learning how to read time in the obscure format and that time could be spent more usefully elsewhere? Well, that presumes it takes longer than oh, a couple of hours to teach kids which hand points to hours and which one points to minutes. And if it does, well, then the kids aren't the only ones in the room laboring under a heavy burden of ignorance.
My parents taught me how to tell time, at home. I had a wristwatch as a very small child that had color-coded hands so I could learn the "hour" and the "minute" hand. I honestly thought that was something parents taught their kids before they were in school..
ReplyDeleteIt feels kind of like...caving...to go "No, students cannot cope with clocks with hands, let's go to all-digital." Friends of mine who do archival work are bemoaning the ending of teaching-of-cursive some school districts talked about - on the grounds that in the future, people would have that much more difficulty reading handwritten documents. (Already I find some European-influenced handwriting hard to decipher)
It feels exactly like caving, yes.
ReplyDeleteI read more than one physical therapist point out that the transition from print to cursive helps refine and improve small muscle-motor control, hand-eye coordination, and so on.
I -- and I suspect a lot of other people -- learned most about how to tell time at home before school ever started as well. So this may wind up as evidence of a cooperative venture of ignorance.