Are you sure clock-reading was kindergarten? Kindergarten tends to be basic numeracy, up to the number 100, and adding and subtracting up to 19, and a few other bits and bobs. Here’s the common core:
Time is introduced in first grade, and only goes to hours and half-hours. Second grade gets into time to the nearest five minutes (which makes sense, because this is where the foundations of multiplication come in), and it’s not until third grade that time to the nearest minute is considered. Here’s the third grade Common Core standards for reference:
Common Core tends to be more advanced than state standards that aren’t based on CC.
I think a lot of folks are forgetting just how difficult it is to learn to tell time on an analog clock. It involves a lot of different skills, which is why it’s currently broken across three grade levels, and I promise that it’s not a single four-hour block as @pkbites suggested above (and I invite anyone who thinks otherwise to try to teach anything to second-graders for four solid hours and see what happens).
Sure, spreadsheets aren’t a first-grade problem. I teach them in fifth grade to advanced math students, and only because they can afford to miss their core class instruction for 45 minutes once a week, and even then I think of what I’m doing as a bare introduction rather than as something that they’ll ever be tested on. But my point remains: given how long it takes to teach analog clocks, I’m unconvinced that that’s the best use of students’ time. What else could we be teaching them, mathematically, that might better prepare them for the math they’ll be doing in the modern world?
The left/right part of your description depends on whether you’re standing north or south of your sundial while reading it. But yes, a northern hemisphere sundial will always have a clockwise rotation. Equally, a southern hemisphere sundial always rotates counterclockwise.
But it’s arbitrary that we think of north as normal and south as “backwards” for lack of a more universal word. And yes, it’s a slightly pejorative meaning I chose on purpose. Northern hemisphere chauvinism is largely unconscious, but is all pervasive. As any southern hemisphere dweller can readily attest. And it’s indefensible except by appeal to laziness.
This topic happens to be top of mind for me; later today I leave for 2 weeks of southern hemisphere travel.
I distinctly remember my kindergarten teacher showing us the clock, and telling us how to tell time on it. I already knew how to tell time, and it was an introduction to “how school works” for me.
We also had a segment on reading clocks in the formal math curriculum. If i had to guess, that was in second grade. It was certainly well before it would have been appropriate to introduce spreadsheets, and before “graphs” were introduced. (I think graphs were 5th or 6th grade, and were limited to bar charts.)
I will defer to your knowledge of how long it takes to reach clocks, though. I was extremely good at all the math-related skills, and was allowed to do the worksheets on my own, pass then in, and move on. So i have zero recollection of how long most students took to get through the clock curriculum. I took a couple of hours, max, but i wasn’t learning, i was just ticking off a box.
Nothing chauvinistic about it – the northern hemisphere is where the vast majority of the population lived (and still does) and Europe at the time was the intellectual center of the world.
When you’re down there, look up at the moon some night, and compare it to what it looks like back home – versus what it looks like, say, in Australia. I like to paraphrase that great sage, Bugs Bunny, on these occasions: “the moon ain’t upside down, doc – you are!”
I was a machinist’s helper when I was in college. My machinist gifted me a nice set of Vernier calipers at one point. Of course, they were pre-digital. I not only still have them over 50 years later, they are sitting in a drawer about 8’ away from me. I use them often, almost daily.
The Christmas before last, I gifted a set of classic Verniers from a highly-regarded Japanese tool manufacturer to each of my three nieces/nephews. They all have engineering degrees and actively work as engineers. The calipers were non-digital and quite expensive (>$250). I obviously meant them more as mementos from their uncle than as tools for daily use, but I did not expect that none of them knew how to read a Vernier scale. Didn’t even understand the concept. One basically said, “Oh. Well we have digital units at work.” How can you be a mechanical engineer and not know anything at all about a Vernier device?
So I gave up the idea of getting them comparable Vernier micrometers the following Christmas.
I’m just now watching Person of Interest, s2e22 ‘God Mode’ which has a scene where it is vitally important for the character to be able to read an analog clock.
Northern hemisphere has more land and more people than the Southern - so there is some justification for NH bias.
I like 'Widdershins" for anti/counter clockwise
As for analog clock reading. Useful: yes. Essential: probably not. Important: not sure
What I’ve been saying all along here is that familiarity with how analog clocks work reinforces a basic visual and spatial understanding of angle orientation and quantity that I think remains important for learning. Not that we ought to be combining clock-reading practice for small children with formal instruction about angles.
As for tabulated data, well of course if your daughter has learned to read and analyze tabulated data, and to write data in table form, then she HAS learned the first thing about spreadsheets. I’m not denying that it can also be useful to teach kids the mechanics of manipulating specific spreadsheet software, though.
My memory of my childhood going all the way back to 2 years old is excellent.
Spring of 1969. We had a thing in class called “centers”. Teacher would go over the thing we were going to learn that day. Then we would go to center to center doing worksheets and working with the teacher and teachers aide. We didn’t go to the next center until we adaquately passed the one before.
When we all went through the centers we then, as a class, recited the times the teacher would show on a clock. I remember having a hard time at first understanding between half past and quarter after the hour. After that half of school, lunch in the gymnasium.
I also remember being able to tell my parents what time it was on the ship wheel clock in our kitchen during supper that night.
I was hoping someone would extend some attention to my beautifully-phrased final sentence, but if they have done so, as yet they have kept it to themselves. Ah well.
How long do you think it would take to teach analog clocks well enough that 70-80% of the students learned it? This may be a place where the 80/20 rule is relevant. The students who learn analog clocks more easily are also likely to go on to doing things as adults where visceral familiarity with angles and fractions is useful. And I agree that we are past the point where anyone needs to be able to read a clock.
I honestly don’t know–it’s hard for me to generalize from my school experience to all kids everywhere. I do know that there are multiple skills involved, of which multiplication is possibly the most difficult, and that it’s spread across several grade levels for a reason.
Okay. I am not taking away from that post what you intend for me to take away from that post. Let’s just say that my skepticism remains even more firmly in place, and that I don’t think you’re going to be able to shake it with further anecdotes.
I’m just not sure that’s true, or the most helpful way to teach that understanding. Much better, I’d think, to work with shape cutouts, with construction sets, even with games that let you build objects with different angles. Because the clock hands require students to focus on the tips of the hands and evaluate multistep expressions, they’ll be unlikely to spend cognitive power on the angles of the hands. Give ‘em a set of plastic triangles, or an Erector set, and angles suddenly become much more important and interesting.
Here’s a game I designed to get kids thinking about polygons. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s more effective at encouraging curiosity about angles.
I loved playing with cuisinaire rods as a kid because they had pretty colors and were perfectly cut and felt smoth and inviting. As a result, I learned what a centimeter feels like. They might have helped me leard addition, too, although I think I already understood addition when I was mostly playing with them.
But anyway, my point is that good children’s toys aren’t just educational, but also need to be physically attractive to children.
I feel like analog clocks are a preschool thing. One of my favorite baby toys in the 80s was the Fisher Price Teaching clock, a toy from the 60s. I remember when my nieces were babies in the early 2010s they had an analog clock toy, and I was running a group for buying & selling baby toys and clocks were always in demand.
I have no doubt that clock reading was/is part of early childhood curriculum but perhaps the basics start at home.
Or maybe it’s not a lack of teaching but a lack of access to pre-k education.
One of the primary purposes of teaching kids is to help them negotiate the world. Teaching them about competing or co-existing systems is all part of education.
Likewise, teaching both metric and English measures. Sure, if they become carpenters, metric won’t be that useful; if they become research scientists, English units won’t be, but the knowledge that the other exists will undoubtedly be handy. You may not use cursive every day, but knowing how to read it is a useful knowledge.
Today, that is.
Ask me again in 100 years. We will have new systems to consider and I might feel differently.
They also used to teach how to find north using a watch and the Sun… am I the only one who remembers that one?
I think there are many styles, especially if you consider internationally. But I was reading a graphic novel a little while ago where there were written notes in joined-up writing. We can assume the reader is expected to at least be able to read it, even if they themselves do not write that way. 200 years from now, it may well be a different story.
And admittedly, the usefulness of analog clocks in reinforcing that visceral familiarity is heavily dependent on the extent to which children are ever actually looking at them in daily life.
Looking at an analog clock face several times a day everywhere you go in order to figure out the time is indeed great for building that sort of “instinctive” cognitive familiarity with angle orientation and magnitude, rotation direction, and all the related stuff I mentioned.
Looking at an analog clock face only for, say, three forty-minute periods during one week of the school year, not so much.
We really do seem to be just talking about different cognitive concepts here, and I’m not sure how to fix that. I am not talking about analog clock-reading as a way to formally teach children the mathematical procedures of angle quantification. For that purpose, I’m sure that the explicit prompts of approaches like your very interesting-looking polygon game are indeed much more directly effective.
I’ll say again that I think there’s a close analogy between the truly important intuitively grasped information from an analog speedometer and the similar information one can instantly glean from an analog clock. I like the example offered by @Chronos on “how long until class is over?”. With an analog clock, you just glance at the angle of the hands. With a digital clock, you literally have to do math.
Sometimes, at least for some purposes, analog truly is better, and I don’t say that just because I’m an Old Fart. That’s why aircraft glass cockpit displays have lots and lots of simulated analog gauges.
