Telling time on analog clock faces is taught in first and second grades as part of the math curriculum. It supports learning about number sense, fractions, skip counting, addition and subtraction, base scales other than tens, and gives foundational experience for understanding polar coordinates later.
You’d possibly replace it in the curriculum of first and second grades with learning spreadsheets?
I answered this question above–but again: no. It’s an example of things that should be taught today and are not, in part because we’re teaching archaic technology instead. It’s not an example of appropriate first-third grade technology.
It certainly would be, but that’s social studies, not math. And it’s also not something that should live at the k-2 curriculum.
(Although arguably, “don’t trust advertising” belongs around then.)
My new electric car has both. One side of the dash shows a dial which points to “about how much of the battery is left”, and the other side has a digital readout that gives the number is miles the car thinks i can still drive.
The number of miles isn’t terribly accurate, because of course it depends on how fast I’m going, whether I’m going uphill or down, and the temperature, all of which change over the course of a drive. It’s a new car. I still look at both.
How much time is actually spent on it? Any teachers/parents want to chime i? Strikes me as - at most - an innocuous lesson in the early grades, which can be easily reinforced by most parents at home or when out and about.
But I personally feel it is beneficial - even if not strictly mandatory for survival. But how many school lessons truly are mandatory for survival?
Have you read the thread? I am an elementary teacher and a parent, and I laid out the three grade levels in which it is taught and provided links to the specific standards. I guess I did not describe how many lessons it would take, but at each grade level, it takes multiple lessons over the course of the year to ensure that students understand the skills and concepts involved. There are at least four separate concepts involved in telling time, and without multiplication, it is a highly difficult process.
I think teachers and parents have the luxury of being able to wait until the kid is old enough to understand better.
Before they had to teach us young because it was more important back then. Analog clocks were so ubiculous. And sometimes that’s all the kid had access to. So they needed to know at an early age.
But I don’t think it would take longer than 20-30 minutes to teach a teenage kid how to do it.
(I’m not a teacher by the way I’m just speculating)
Because this confusion has arisen a few times, here’s a possible proposal to make use of the time that’d theoretically be freed up by removing analog clocks from the curriculum:
Fifth grade is a great time to introduce spreadsheets–but their curriculum is already really full. One of items in the fifth grade curriculum could possibly move to earlier grades: coordinate grids. These take awhile to teach, not because there’s any particularly complex operations involved, but because they’re a new and weird concept. It’s a concept that could start earlier.
First grade: teach students to play Battleship, with a letter-labeled axis and a number-labeled axis. This would also help with later understanding of spreadsheets, as cells are labeled like Battleship spots, not like coordinate grids.
Second grade: teach students to locate and plot a point on a coordinate grid.
Third grade: incorporate coordinate grid work into the work third graders already do with perimeter and quadrilaterals.
Again, this is completely speculative: I’ve never tried to teach coordinate grids to first-graders, and have barely worked with fifth-graders on them, so maybe I’m missing something. I’m well aware that when you get into the weeds of math instruction, you uncover hidden concepts crucial to understanding what you want to teach, and if students don’t know those hidden concepts, they’ll never learn what you want them to learn.
But an approach like this – teaching coordinate grids earlier, teaching spreadsheets later, keeping analog clock use to a much briefer part of the curriculum–would enable students to learn modern technology instead of archaic technology.
I’m not sure you’re right, that it’d be 20-30 minutes; but when someone has a firm understanding of both multiplication and complex expressions, it’d certainly be simpler.
Consider that time is basically X:(5Y+Z), where X is the last number touched by the hour hand, Y is the last number touched by the minute hand, and Z is the number of notches past the last number touched by the minute hand. That’s is a helluva lot for most seven-year-olds to absorb, but by the time someone is fourteen, hopefully they’ve seen some complex expressions like that and could pick it up a little more easily.
Next hot take: let’s quit spending so much time teaching coin recognition!
Apologies. Yes, I read it, but apparently did not retain well enough to obtain a passing grade in your class.
Or the possibility exists that your prior post may not have been as memorable as you believe.
Upon re-reading, I suspect I was put off by the tone and lack of persuasiveness of your initial several posts, that I likely paid insufficient attention to Post 140/228 - which you could have directed me to slightly more graciously.
Okey dokey!
So, about 4 hours a year for 3 years? 10? I’ve also been wondering about how much time we are discussing.
And surely it isn’t taught completely separately from multiplication‽
I’m not totally sure how long it’d take in total. Here is how one math curriculum (probably my favorite that I know of) teaches the first grade objectives: it takes four lessons. Search the PDF for “5.d.1” or look at lessons 10-13
Note that you always have to do follow-up and review. These four lessons are four hours each, but you’d want to do additional activities throughout the year to help students retain and practice the skills.
How many kids need to learn it in school? I could read a clock before I started kindergarten.
Another, alternative proposal: instead of teaching kids to read an analog clock, teach them to cook.
ADVANTAGES:
Cooking is a much more useful life-skill than reading analog clocks.
Cooking gives students deep understanding of fractions in a way that is difficult to achieve through most other means.
Cooking also familiarizes students with measurement techniques.
Crucially, cooking demands close attention to detail, especially with unit labels. If you’ve never ruined a recipe by confusing teaspoons for tablespoons, you’re a carefuller cook than I; and making that mistake provides immediate feedback on the importance of double-checking work and noting units.
DISADVANTAGES:
Where did you tend to score on percentile math tests?
Edit: of course you don’t need to answer this: I’m not asking you to boast. Rather, I hope people consider that if they were in the 99th percentile, or 90th percentile, or whatever of math learners, their experiences may not be typical, and that schools are responsible for reaching students in the 10th percentile and 1st percentile as well.
That’s interesting. It seems well integrated with teaching about shapes. Also, those lessons aren’t just about reading analog clocks. They are also about understanding the multiple ways we say time (a language skill) and about thinking about how time passes. (A time skill that isn’t about clocks, even if it’s taught in the context of clocks.) If you dropped those modules completely you would certainly be doing a disservice to the students. A greater disservice than dropping interpolation.
But i see why it’s hard for you to estimate how much time analog clocks take up.
That’s a really good point–if we drop analog clocks, we still need to teach time. My contention is that we should teach time-telling using the technology that students will almost always use, i.e., digital clocks, not sundials or hourglasses or water clocks or analog clocks. Even if all of those technologies have peripheral benefits (imagine what students could learn about volume if we used hourglasses!), they still have quirks that take time to learn and aren’t necessary.
Well, i think the passage of time is much more naturally taught in the context of an analog clock, or an hour glass, than in the context of digital clocks, fwiw. Having a physical aid of some sort is general helpful in grasping a concept.
The physical aid that’s most useful at this point in time is the analog clock. I think you’ve just convinced me they ought to stay on the curriculum, even for students who aren’t going to go on to do graphing and such.
Not that it would be bad for students to end up not learning to tell time on an analog clock, but it would be bad to fail to develop a sense of time, and how to measure that, and many students will be helped by having the analog clock as a reference in the lessons.
You’re the teacher here but your claim that coordinate grids is so “new and weird” of a concept seems without basis. Everything about graphing on X and Y axes gives kids the basics of that.
And a six to eight year old learns Battleship in two minutes.
And spreadsheets? Are already becoming yesterday’s technology.
Your position seems to be that analog clocks are not a tool that kids really need to use much as adults. I certainly am not arguing that they. They are however an excellent tool to teach about the odd mixed base scales used in time telling, however you later report it, and teach a sizable list of essential math concepts that first and second graders need to learn - none of which learning Battleship supports.
Learning to report the time isn’t the primary goal. Understanding what it means is partly, but all those math concepts much more so. Your dismissal of that I do not get.