Resolved: Students should learn about data management, collection, analysis, and effective communication of data in various formats. Further the fundamentals of these skills should be started in age appropriate ways in the primary grades, and build on the skills through High School. Spreadsheets are one tool of that goal.
My WAG is that the big push over the next several years will need to become implementation of AI tools to organize and create and to query the datasets, teaching students to understand what they need to get the AI to produce, why, and to query it in the most useful ways. Spreadsheets may be a portion of that. But the bigger job is recognizing garbage in and faulty analysis.
AI in this way is what calculators were to some of us in High School, and computers with Word to my kids. Again this is not decades. The AI tools are already built into Excel and Google products, and Claude 3 is supposedly amazing at handling data in various formats, including but not limited to creation and analysis of spreadsheets.
Back to learning clocks reading in early grades … about time maybe?
All this talk about spreadsheets reminds me that Keith Devlin gave spreadsheets as an example of why it’s important to learn algebra and think algebraically, back in 2011.
Funny you should mention that - my family got our first computer - an Apple IIGS - when I was in 2nd grade. I was fascinated by every aspect of it; I was even happy to help Dad type stuff into Quicken because it was a chance to type on the computer. One of my favorite things was the tutorial software, which included a segment with basic instructions on how to use a spreadsheet. It didn’t include any serious lessons regarding formulas, but I picked up enough that I was very comfortable with spreadsheets when I started using them years later.
My Human Factors lecturer taught us that analog displays are better for relative amounts, and digital displays are better for absolute amounts.
And that moving-bar displays are better for telling you if you are driving at a safe speed,
and digital displays are better for telling you if you are driving at a legal speed,
and that clock-dial speedometers are a comprimise between the two.
The hospital I was in a while back had an analog clock in every room. I would attach more significance to that if the clocks had all worked, but they didn’t.
older post I wrote a time back but forgot to submit:
One thing I suspect is missing in this analysis is exactly what it means to be able to read a clock.
I recently had a conversation with my best friend, who cited his (other) best friend Lance pointing out that he had trouble reading clocks. I made the observation that my friend and I are 40 and 35 years old, while Lance is 30, and that perhaps there is some sort of generational divide going on.
Now, does Lance stare at a clock and have no idea what time it is? Of course not. It’s just that he has to sit there and consciously process it. He has to do it the way kids did when they first learned how to tell time. He has to convert it to the type of time he more intuitively understands.
And that I feel is a significant thing. It shows how little importance it actually is, as he doesn’t use it as often.
I know how to read clocks, even without numbers. I am not dyslexic or have any issues with visual spcial reasoning.
And yet I’ve never thought about clocks when visualizing time. Time, in any way I find relevant, is linear, not cyclical. I just picture the future in front of me or to the right, and the past behind me or to the left.
I recall exactly once thinking of clocks as angles. It was one of those problems the TAG class (a gifted program where they took you out of class for a while every week). It asked me to find all the times on a clock that resulted in a 90 degree angle.
While I’ve heard some people use them to describe actual directions IRL, it’s very rare. The cardinal and ordinal directions give you 8 points, which is generally enough. As is something like “in front of you to your right.”
I have no trouble converting either analog or digital clocks to my understanding of time. Neither one are my only way. I suspect that, if analog clocks are useful, kids will wind up continuing to learn how to read them. Otherwise they will not.
As for my own perceptions of how I learned? I don’t remember spending any paperwork-style class time on it. But I also attended a Montessori school. I’m sure we had some hands on things with it. But the only one I particular remember is that the playground had a toy clock we could “set” the time on.
Other than that, I remember my parents teaching me. I remember we had one clock with a second hand, and I observed that staring at it seemed like time didn’t move, but staring at one with a second hand did. I remember staring at the clock after my allergy shot because they had to wait some number of minutes to make sure I didn’t have a bad reaction.
If analog clocks are important, I think you’d have to spend more time in class teaching them since kids are less likely to have these experiences with them otherwise. I know people who are 18 or younger who say the only analog clocks they ever saw were in school, and that they were all old and were never set properly or were broken.
I don’t want to threadshit but the OP question strikes me as an odd one, as though there are only about twenty analogue watches and clocks left on the planet. Now this is a giant guess on my part but maybe 60 or 70 % of my friends have wristwatches and I can’t think of any which are digital. I also see enough people in public wearing watches which are analogue.
Also, if you pass any jewelry store, they display tons of analogue watches. And in my travels through various European cities there seem to be enough Breitling stores in the various downtowns, and they’re mostly (possibly all) very cool-looking analogues.
When people refer to angles as being relevant to a clock, that’s not what’s meant. What’s relevant is not the angle between the hour hand and minute hand. What’s relevant is the angle between the minute hand and the minute hand. Or more precisely, the minute hand as it is at this time, and the minute hand as it is at that time. Or the hour hand, for longer spans.
Yes, i don’t know anyone who cares about the angle between the minute hand and the hour hand, except maybe for a math puzzle. The two angles that matter are
Regardless, none of that came up in my schooling. The only time angles did come up is the time I mentioned, where it was about the minute and hour hand.*
My point is that, even though I knew how to read a clock, it never came up with teaching angles, so learning angles is clearly not a good argument for keeping analog clocks on the curriculum.
*A problem I did entirely in my head, because I obviously knew how to read clocks even 30 years ago.
If you know how to read a clock, then angles came up. Maybe nobody ever said the word “angle” in connection with a clock, and they certainly would never have referred to units for measuring those angles*, but that’s still what you were using.
*In fact, I think that this misunderstanding might be a facet of a common misunderstanding about units. Units aren’t a part of a quantity. Units are a part of how we describe quantities. I can draw two lines on a board and say “That’s an angle”, and it remains that same angle whether I measure it in degrees, radians, or something else. Or, I can draw two marks and refer to the distance between them, which is the same distance in inches, centimeters, or with no units specified at all. And even without units, I can still say things like “This angle is larger than that angle”, or “the difference between these two angles is this other angle”, or even “this angle is twice that angle”. Clock-angles are usually used without units, or converted to time-units, but they’re still angles.
High end watches have all sorts of frivolous crap, but still two or three hands that point to hours, minutes and seconds. Those are never going to be replaced by digital, as much as the Apple Watch would like them to be.
“Big Ben” in London, alongside many, many town halls and churches all over the world have analogue timepieces.
And finally, if I could make a minor dig at President Trump… clock faces are part of several standardised mental health tests. That does not easily change.
(I learned to read a clock before I learned to read a sundial. The march of progress!)
I think it’s also quicker to communicate; “Bandits at 2 o’clock high” is just quicker and simpler to say and be done, than “ahead a bit, but sort of to the right, and also up a bit. If you look to the right of centre, then up, you know. FINE JUST LOOK WHERE I AM POINTING!”
Speed and clarity is a big part of it, but it’s just as easy to say “relative bearing 060 high”. But it’s also situational and a lot depends on how much accuracy is called for. You’ll rarely hear clock bearings in a naval engagement because they need to be more accurate. If you’ve seen the movie Greyhound, early on the Captain orders “report all bearings as relative.” This is important, because they won’t have time to determine if 060 means northeast or off the starboard bow. 2 o’clock isn’t accurate enough because if the target is bearing 050, 2 o’clock is a miss.
Two o’clock high is handy for helping someone find the interesting bird, for instance, because an hour is about your range of vision. And it’s always relative (in my experience) so you don’t need to know which way is true East, which you do if you want to tell someone “the eagle is perched approximately NE of us”.
They’re not used much in aerial combat either. At least not if you’re doing it right.
Ideally you spot the bad guys on radar and communicate that to your flight-mates in terms of relative bearing, range, and altitude. All derived from your radar picture and spoken in numbers. “Bogey 330, 15 miles, plus 10” (meaning thousands of feet above you)
OTOH, if the first time you see the enemy, or their ordnance, is when it’s in your shit, it’s more like “BREAK LEFT! Bandits left 7 o’clock low.”
