It seems that the analog clock is becoming an extinct skill in this fast-paced world of digital clocks. With a world full of smartphones, tablets and clocks with digital displays, it is likely that a number of younger children are growing up never needing to glance at the hour hand and the minute hand of a traditional clock. And unfortunately, it is starting to show up in schools.
Throughout the United States—and even earlier in the United Kingdom—schools are removing the analog clock from classrooms altogether. In its place, schools are adding digital clocks. The reason? Students spend too much time trying to decipher what the analog clock hands mean instead of focusing on their work. For some students, upon completing an exam, the nervous energy trying to calculate how much time remains is overwhelming when asked to interpret the clock hands. While some students race through the exam, others tend to run out of time altogether simply because they can not check the time the traditional way.
Just one generation ago, it was a non-issue. Reading the analog clock was as natural as breathing; it was a basic skill taught early, practiced frequently, and reinforced with daily usage. But now, high school students need to think about it. Our digital world—where every phone, tablet, and smart device has a digital clock—likely resulted in kids no longer having a fair chance to learn how to tell time on an analog clock. And when an analog clock is in the room, the analog clock probably doesn’t stand a “chance.” Readily available to them is usually a quicker digital response to the same question.
This puts students’ academic futures at risk. If students can’t learn to manage time, a critical preparation for success in school, it will be difficult to develop the first and necessary measure of success: the clock. According to changed schools who now only use digital displays during timed testing, students feel a bit more at ease, stay more focused, and patient, and therefore tend to perform better overall. And teachers will agree: fewer distractions, fewer penalties and disruptions = a better classroom experience.
Still, many optimism exists and educators remain hopeful. There appears to be a bigger push to continue teaching the analog clock—not merely to teach us some common nostalgia—but to possibly preserve a valuable cognitive skill. Unlike a digital clock display, reading an analog clock requires some of the spatial reasoning and aspects of a cognition with time that digital displays simply do not allow.
As the digital world continues its evolution, educators are beginning to find that balancing time-saving tools, while ensuring that skills like reading an analog clock does not go extinct, is a challenge. We may find that the challenge of teaching the proper way to read the analog clock has never been more complex. Nonetheless, it appears that some lessons are worth saving.
