The smartphones are out of the New York City classrooms, and the teachers are enjoying the benefit of clearer minds, better focus, and livelier lunch conversations. But the statewide ban, which went into effect in the fall, has revealed a surprising disparity in the skills of today’s generation of teenagers: they can’t read clocks.
Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at a high school in the Queens section of New York City, observed the problem from day one. The students were attending classes on time, no longer dawdling in the hallways with their phones, but they did not have a clue about what time it really is.
NYC Schools Rediscover the “Life Skill” of Telling Time
Manhattan high school English teacher Madi Mornhinweg hears the same question over and over: “Miss, what time is it?” Her students constantly want to know how many minutes remain in class, but the wall clock might as well be written in hieroglyphics. “It finally got to the point where I started saying ‘Where’s the big hand and where’s the little hand?'” she said.
The irony isn’t lost on educators. The phone ban has been wildly successful at Cardozo and in schools across the city. The traffic flows better in the hallways. The kids are mingling in person rather than on feeds.
The class room attention span has been raised. But to be forced to do it without their electronic fix, many young people are realizing they have not learned this life skill.
As per the New York City Department of Education, children learn how to read clocks in the first and second grades. They learn words such as ‘o’clock,’ ‘half past,’ and ‘quarter to,’ among others, in these early years in elementary school.
“As our young people grow up in an ever more digital world, no traditional time-reading skills should be left behind,” said a spokesperson for the education department, Isla Gething.
However, it seems that several students just quit using the skill around the time they reached high school. What is the point when all of their devices are going to be displaying the time electronically?
Why the Analog Clock is Disappearing from Classrooms?
Outside a Brooklyn school called Midwood High School, the problem in math was easily recognized by the students as a problem that other people faced, rather than themselves. Cheyenne Francis, aged fourteen, said, “They just forgot that skill because they never used it, because they always pulled out their phone.”
“Sometimes, I have that lazy habit too. I know how to read the clock if I really need to. But I feel like most students here, they just get lazy and they ask. And I feel like I do that a lot,” stated Farzona Yakuba, age 15.
But the problem doesn’t just pertain to New York. According to a survey done in 2017 among children aged 6-12 in Oklahoma, only one out of every five children was able to read an analog clock properly. In England, they’ve already begun to swap out analog clocks with digital clocks in the classroom a year ago in 2018. Grandfather and cuckoo clocks are just a distant memory and a symbol of a time when they were common in their family homes.
“It’s underutilized,” said Travis Malekpour, who teaches social studies and math at Cardozo. He’s responded by weaving time-telling and calendar management into his algebra lessons.
Is Modern Education Trading Brainpower for Bytes?
Kris Perry of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development thinks the pertinent question might well be whether this corresponds to a cognitive downgrade or simply a substitution. She referred to research indicating activities like holding books and writing by hand stimulate more of the brain compared to their digital counterparts.
Nevertheless, educators point out today’s generation of students is not lacking skills, simply skills of a different nature. Many schools have highly advanced coding education programs. Many students help teachers keep up with new technology.
Kris Perry of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development thinks the pertinent question might well be whether this corresponds to a cognitive downgrade or simply a substitution. She referred to research indicating activities like holding books and writing by hand stimulate more of the brain compared to their digital counterparts.
Nevertheless, educators point out today’s generation of students is not lacking skills, simply skills of a different nature. Many schools have highly advanced coding education programs. Many students help teachers keep up with new technology.
