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Britan schools are replacing analog clockss because kids can't read them during tests.

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Britan schools are replacing analog clockss because kids can't read them during tests.

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Schools in Britain are throwing their hands up over kids who can't tell time on traditional clocks.

Some U.K. schools are ditching analog clocks from test rooms because a generation of kids raised on digital clocks can't read them and are getting stressed about time running out during tests, London's Telegraph reports.

"The current generation aren't as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations," Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary of the U.K.'s Association of School and College Leaders, told The Telegraph.

"They are used to seeing a digital representation of time on their phone, on their computer. Nearly everything they've got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere."

Officials believed the clocks are causing undue stress because kids can't figure out how much time they have remaining to complete a test.

"You don't want them to put their hand up to ask how much time is left,'' Trobe said.

"Schools will inevitably be doing their best to make young children feel as relaxed as the can be. There is actually a big advantage in using digital clocks in exam rooms because it is much less easy to mistake a time on a digital clock when you are working against time."

It's not just British kids, either. American kids also have their struggles figuring out what those ticking hands on a clock mean.

An Arizona elementary school teacher wrote a blog post in 2014 about whether students should still be taught how to read analog clocks, arguing that they help visual learners but also noting that they are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Jimmy Kimmel had some fun with the issue on his late-night show Tuesday.

A group of kids on the street were each asked to tell the time by looking at an analog clock and the results weren't pretty. (Kudos to the one kid who got it right).

Move over, VCRs, rotary phones and answering machines. It might be time to make room for analog clocks.
Follow TODAY.com writer Scott Stump on Twitter.

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Schools are throwing out analog clocks because kids can't read them

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Schools in Britain are throwing their hands up over kids who can't tell time on traditional clocks. Some U.K. schools are ditching analog clocks from test rooms because a generation of kids raised on digital clocks can't read them and are getting stressed about time running out during tests, London's Telegraph reports.

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In late April 2018 rumors about schools' removing analog clocks because students couldn't read them began to pop up all across the Internet:

Analog clocks are kinda the worst. tbh. https://t.co/JwWYOtb8HM

- BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) May 3, 2018

Kids can't tell time anymore! Aren't they supposed to be taught in schools? What are they doing in schools? https://t.co/fYBnLY6gwL

- Bethann (@sewwutnow) May 4, 2018

Not unexpectedly, readers combined truncated headlines and conversations with what they already believed to be true: that students in 2018 are bereft of the most basic life skills, including knowing how to read the time from a standard clock face.

Richmond, Virginia, television station WWBT was among several regional news affiliates repeating a somewhat inaccurate version of the story:

Schools in Great Britain, which is home to Big Ben, are removing analog clocks from classrooms because the students can't read what time the clocks say, according to a report in The Telegraph.

Of course, another option would be to teach the students to read the clocks.

[An] official told The Telegraph he hopes that happens.

In that report at least one frequently-overlooked detail was present: that the information pertained to schools in the United Kingdom, not the United States. Like nearly all local versions of this story, WWBT referenced an April 2018 article from The Telegraph but omitted some key details present in the original report.

According to the story's most notable early appearance, the topic of analog clocks in schools came up only in the context of a specific type of examination. A representative of an educators' association explained that for exams which were not unlike the United States' Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), teachers had grown weary of disruptions from students unsure about how much time remained in the testing session.

Although the report began by saying that schools were "removing analogue clocks from examination halls because teenagers are unable to tell the time," it explained that teachers (not students) ushered in the change due in part to disruptions:

Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct time on an analogue clock.

Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said youngsters have become accustomed to using digital devices ... Mr Trobe, a former headmaster, said that teachers want their students to feel as relaxed as possible during exams. Having a traditional clock in the room could be a cause of unnecessary stress, he added.

"You don't want them to put their hand up to ask how much time is left," he said.

"Schools will inevitably be doing their best to make young children feel as relaxed as they can be. There is actually a big advantage in using digital clocks in exam rooms because it is much less easy to mistake a time on a digital clock when you are working against time."

Trobe did say that some students struggled to interpret time from standard clocks, but the observation was made entirely in the context of students' trying to estimate the time remaining (not necessarily trying to tell time in general) during high-stakes standardized examinations (not during ordinary classroom exams, tests, or quizzes). But social media users quickly abbreviated the claim made by one educator to suggest that multiple schools were filling dumpsters with analog clocks because modern students found them unreadable, while the more specific story was misrepresented in both local news reports and social media conversations.

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Are Schools Removing Analog Clocks Because Students Can't Read Them?

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In late April 2018 rumors about schools' removing analog clocks because students couldn't read them began to pop up all across the Internet: Analog clocks are kinda the worst. tbh. https://t.co/JwWYOtb8HM - BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) May 3, 2018 Kids can't tell time anymore! Aren't they supposed to be taught in schools?

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Clocks can be split into two broad categories based on how they display information.

Analog, aka mechanical, clocks use moving hands to indicate the current time. Digital clocks, on the other hand, display time as a set of numbers, typically via an LCD or other electronic screen.

(It's technically possible to have an electronic clock with an analog display, but it's very rare - we'll treat analog and mechanical as synonyms.)

Every clock needs three fundamental parts:

1. Timekeeping mechanism: a way to keep accurate track of the passage of time.

2. Energy source: a way to provide energy for the motion of the other various components.

3. Display: shows the user what the current time is.

In the most basic terms, a clock is a device that uses energy to display time, regulated by a timekeeping mechanism.

Consider a sand-filled hourglass - a very simple analog clock. Its energy source is the pull of gravity, its display is the amount of sand held in each half, and its timekeeping mechanism is the relatively constant rate at which sand flows through the narrow opening between the two halves.

In more sophisticated analog clocks, the three fundamental parts are connected via gears, pulleys, and other mechanical systems.

In modern clocks, the mechanical components may be replaced by wires and electrical currents. There are more possible configurations than we could ever cover, so let's take a closer look at one particular type of clock.

Pendulum clocks are arguably the first modern clocks.

A pendulum, you'll remember, is a weight hung from a fixed point and allowed to swing back and forth - you can make a simple one by dangling a pair of earbuds.

At the turn of the 17th Century, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei's experiments in physics led him to discover this unique feature of pendulums: one will always take the same amount of time to complete a full swing.

This is true even as air resistance and other factors slowly reduce how far a pendulum moves with each swing, right up until the moment it stops.

He immediately recognized the potential of pendulums for timekeeping inside a clock mechanism, but it wasn't until 1656 that Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, inspired by Galileo's work, designed a working pendulum clock.

Huygens didn't have the skill to implement his design, so he hired professional clockmaker Salomon Coster to build it.

Let's look at how pendulum clocks work according to the three-part breakdown (timekeeping mechanism, energy source, and display) we used above.

Energy Source: Like an hourglass, the first pendulum clocks used gravity to generate energy through a system of weights hanging from pulleys. Turning a key would "wind" the clock, lifting the weights and storing potential energy by holding the weights up against gravity.

Timekeeping Mechanism: A pendulum and a component called an escapement regulate the rate at which energy from the weights is released. The escapement includes a notched wheel that ensures it can only move in discrete steps, or "ticks."

Each completed swing of the pendulum releases one tick on the escapement, which in turn allows the weights to drop a tiny bit.

Display: The hands of the clock are connected via gear train to the rest of the mechanism.

When the escapement releases one tick of energy, the gears turn and the hands move the correct amount.

If you assume a one-second pendulum swing, which was common in later designs, every tick ends up moving the seconds hand exactly 1/60th of the way around the clock face.

In the simplest terms: energy is stored using raised weights, then released at a precise rate by timekeeping pendulum mechanism, which turns the hands of the display to show the current time.

It may have occurred to you that a pendulum would not work in a watch, which is constantly moving around.

Instead, mechanical watches use mainsprings and balance wheels. Spring-driven clocks actually predate pendulum clocks by about 200 years, but were considerably less accurate.

The mainspring is wound tight to store energy. The balance wheel is a specially weighted disk; once set in motion it rotates back and forth at a regular rate to act as a timekeeping mechanism.

Today, the most common clocks are quartz clocks, named for their timekeeping mechanism.

Quartz crystals are piezoelectric: if you run an electric current through them, they vibrate at a specific rate. Notice a trend? Almost any process with a specific rate can act as a timekeeping mechanism.

A typical modern battery-powered clock sends a miniscule electric current through a quartz crystal, which is set in a circuit that acts like an escapement: it releases small amounts of electricity from the battery at regular intervals dictated by the vibration of the quartz.

Each regular "ticks" of electricity either powers a motor to move analog hands or controls the output to a digital screen.

You may have seen or heard of an atomic clock.

They're almost entirely digital, so we won't get into details, but the basic principles of how they work are the same as the clocks above. The big difference is their timekeeping: they are built around a mechanism that measures the precise rate at which cesium atoms release energy after being "excited" by radio waves.

The International System of Units standardized its definition of one second on the properties of cesium in 1967, and it has remained the standard since.

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Every clock needs three things: a timekeeping mechanism (e.g. a pendulum), an energy source (e.g. a wound spring), and a display (e.g. a round face with numbers and hands that point to the current time). Many types of clocks exist, but they all share this basic structure.

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Article about some satudents don't know about to tell time on an analog clock.

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Article about some satudents don't know about to tell time on an analog clock.

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Despite smartphones and other technological advances, one object has withstood the test of time: the analog clock.

Many of us remember learning about them in schools, between the "big hand, little hand" and converting those numbers to multiples of 5.

But is the analog clock's life in schools slowly ticking away?

According to London's Telegraph, some schools in the U.K. are ditching analog clocks for digital ones because students are struggling to read them.

"The current generation aren't as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations," said Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders.

Telling time is a key part of elementary school curriculum in the U.S., as many kids read the hands on a clock and write out the correct time.

In 2014, a teacher in Arizona discussed whether it was time to retire the analog clock in an age of smartphones and smartwatches where everything is digital, citing a colleague who wanted to teach his seventh grade class because they couldn't read the analog clock on the wall.

Carol Burris, executive director of the advocacy Network for Public Education and former educator with more than 25 years experience, said teaching analog time still holds value.

"The skills that you need to read an analog clock are skills that kids when they're young begin to learn," she said, citing concepts such as counting by fives and fractions.

Meanwhile, schools using Common Core standards for math require educators to teach kids in earlier grades such as first or second.

While schools in the U.K. have chosen to pull analog clocks, it appears the devices' time in U.S. schools won't expire any time soon.

"There's a lot of very complex mathematical manipulations that are involved in being able to tell time with an analog clock," Burris said. "It takes some of the math skills students are learning and gives them an important real world context."
Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @brettmolina23.

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Some students don't know how to read analog clocks. Is it the end of an era?

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Despite smartphones and other technological advances, one object has withstood the test of time: the analog clock. Many of us remember learning about them in schools, between the "big hand, little hand" and converting those numbers to multiples of 5. But is the analog clock's life in schools slowly ticking away?

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It looks like the analog clock's days may be numbered. According to a recent article in the Telegraph, some U.K. schools are removing them from exam halls after discovering teenagers have a hard time reading traditional clock faces. Apparently the move is an attempt to reduce testing anxiety in a generation raised on digital devices. "The current generation aren't as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations," said Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders, in an interview with the newspaper. "They are used to seeing a digital representation of time on their phone, on their computer. Nearly everything they've got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere."

The news was met with as much hand wringing as I'm sure met the phasing out of such necessary skills as reading a sun dial or spooling a type writer. "I would be the teacher who would say tough - but apparently that's not how kids are raised," wrote one Twitter denizen. He went on to lament that these same kids probably couldn't read Roman numerals-where exactly those two things connect, I'm still not sure. Another American analog acolyte who didn't apparently read that the clock phase out was taking place in the U.K. asked, "Are we getting out [sic] money's worth from government education? We know students cannot write in script. Or are they just being taught anti-social behavior, multi-gender personalities and anti-American hatred for our Founding?" A significant number of commentators responded to the news with something along the lines of, "Teach them to read it then?" To which I would answer, "Why?"

The fact that analog clocks have managed to stand the test of time in an increasingly digitized world is a bit of a wonder. While there may be nothing quite as charming as the quiet tick of a watch, the fact that teachers are adapting to the fact that a fair number of teenagers can't read an analog clock isn't another sign of corruption in The Youth. It means, as Nobel Prize Winner Bob Dylan once wrote, that times are a-changing. It doesn't make sense for a teacher to waste precious class time to teach teenagers how to read an analog clock just so they can tell time during an exam. And if students can't read traditional clock faces with relative ease by the time they're sitting for exams, it means one of two things: Somewhere down the line their teacher prioritized other knowledge over doing countless worksheets on telling time, or they've just forgotten something they learned in elementary school once they tested out of that grade.

Kids in America who learn under Common Core standards are required to be taught how to read an analog clock in first or second grade; if kids in the U.K. are taught around the same time than it wouldn't be entirely surprising to learn that they forgot how to do so by the time they're teenagers. With the sheer amount of stuff kids are expected to know once state exams roll around, it's understandable that they'd get a bit rusty on something they're not using every day.

Plenty of naysayers will crow about the practical use of knowing how to read an analog clock once the electricity goes out, but since when is school about teaching practical skills? I don't remember learning how to file an insurance claim or write a check or pay taxes in school, all skills that are objectively more practical in the long run than reading an analog clock. That's not to say that the skill needs to go the way of cursive: Telling time on a traditional clock face is a real world application of complex mathematical skills and teachers seem to agree that it gives children a different relation to time than reading a digital clock does. "Analog clocks are great for teaching time management [and] concepts including the passage of time," answered one Arizonan teacher when asked why she still felt the skill was important to teach. "Even our little kids who don't yet have the concept of numerals can understand that when the big hand is on this red line it's time to line up."

By all means, I'm sure small children will continue to be taught multiples of five through the use of an analog clock. But it's entirely fair for that skill to fade by the time those kids reach puberty and for teachers to adapt to the fact that the days of analog ubiquity are slowly ticking away.

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Some U.K. Schools Are Phasing Out the Analog Clock. It's About Time.

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It looks like the analog clock's days may be numbered. According to a recent article in the Telegraph, some U.K. schools are removing them from exam halls after discovering teenagers have a hard time reading traditional clock faces. Apparently the move is an attempt to reduce testing anxiety in a generation raised on digital devices.

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steel case schools sapling smpte synchronized wall clock alarm clock visiplex wireless crosse technology

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How To Tell Time On An Analog Clock-Full Tutorial.

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How To Tell Time On An Analog Clock-Full Tutorial.

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How To Tell Time On An Analog Clock-Full Tutorial