I feel like most of these comments have ignored the article. They were taught how to read clocks, in first and second grade. Then they had no need of the skill for most of a decade and it atrophied. I suspect many would struggle to remember some of the things we had down well in elementary school, like writing fully in cursive, knowing the difference between types of rocks and clouds, or giving some full speech you had to memorize at the time (it was Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty" speech for me). And if you're someone who does know the difference between your cumulonimbus, cirrocumulus and such, rad! But do you suspect most of your peers remember?
I think the better question is, and the article poses this, why are students not bothering to refresh the skill now that it's necessary again?
This makes me wonder what methods of transferring information we may have lost historically that we don't even recognize?
Will there be analog clocks in 30 years? It seems somewhat doubtful, particularly if this generation can't read them.
What benefit is there to keep this antiquated method around, aside from just as an historical reference?
I'm in my 50s, so I can read an analog clock, and I have analog watches. But I don't feel the need to force this method of time on future generations.
Digital clocks are not subject to the drift that analog clocks are, they don't require the user to learn to read them, and if they are broken, it is fairly obvious at first glance.
What benefit does an analog clock have, aside from that it can work without power? And even then, it's only those that are purely mechanical, which I think is also dying out.
The power thing is a red herring. "Analog" clocks are almost always electric and digital under the hood. And battery technology has been good enough for them to stay powered for longer than actual analog clocks for decades. If you really wanted to, you can create an entirely mechanical digital clock.
The main benefit of the analog style output is in the ability to quickly read the output. You can get an approximate sense of the time with a much quicker glance, even if determining the time to the minute takes longer than with a digital display.
Luxury watches are analog. Maybe people 50 years from now won't even know if the clock is telling the time correctly and will just wear the watch to show off...
The future is now. I personally know someone who does that. It's a fancy watch that only gets worn sometimes. And it's an automatic so it needs to be moved for it to keep running. So when they wear it every few days it is completely out of sync and they can't be bothered to adjust the time.
It is purely an accessory and completely useless for telling the time.
No judgment, but it just seems silly.
Apparently the correct way to solve it is to store the watch in a cradle that keeps it moving perpetually.
My kids are spending hours of class time in school learning Roman numerals. The correct amount of education about Roman numerals is a short form video of math trivia when you're 23. Zero classroom time should be wasted on an inferior system of numerals.
Learning to read Roman numerals is secretly an exercise in mental arithmetic. You're summing numbers in your head as you go, and occasionally you'll need to keep that sum off to the side while you subtract a second number from a third. So rather than viewing it as time wasted on learning an obsolete numeral system, instead consider it as a different way to frame a math exercise.
It's not about forcing anything onto anyone, it's about teaching useful skills (at school or at home).
Analog clocks are sufficiently common to make how to read them an useful skill.
We got taught in first and second grade, reading maps and navigating by them included. Was neccessity for Schnitzeljagd and other scavenger hunt-type games. But, to be fair, most kids already knew how to read timepieces.
Bullshit. Information is everywhere, if they WANTED to learn how to read them they could go on wikipedia or youtube.
That excuse could've worked when I was a teenager, where to learn something you have to either learn it from a person or from a book, but not nowadays.
Is learning how to read an analogue clock really an effective use of one's time? I myself was taught how an am able to read an analogue clock, but I doubt that I would be much worse off without that abulity.
Do you know how to use a fountain pen? Do you know how to tell your position by the stars? Do you know how to start a fire with sticks and stones? Life's too short to spend it hoarding trivia.
Children need instruction, they’re not born with an inbuilt list of things they should probably learn and the desire to go and learn them without guidance.
If we were talking about 6 year olds I wouldn't made this comment. Plenty of teenagers are curious about the world around them. The ones that can't read a clock, aren't. By the time people get to their teens there's already a huge huge range of interests and yes, IQ too.
> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said.
i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.
30% of NYC public school students are functionally illiterate in high school. There is zero chance you will be able to teach them analog clock in a day and forget about an hour.
The discussion about this on the teachers subreddit repeated the claim of 'Of course they can't read a clock, NY teachers are only allowed to teach things that are explicitly specified on any of the syllabi or tests and reading a clock isn't on the list.'. The other internet fora for teachers have exactly as much cynicism as you'd expect too, but there is an implied grain of truth:
Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded. RAND estimated K-12 unexplained absences reached 21% in 2023 and early estimates for the last year suggest that strong attention to fixing it has brought it down to 13%, which is an improvement but is still way too high.
> Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded.
That buries the lede. Why don't they have time? Isn't education their goal? Or is test taking their goal? And why? Is it because the school gets federal funding based on test results and student attendance?
We've ruined schools the same way the British found the Cobra Effect. We've created entirely the wrong incentives for everyone involved.
Educating and socializing kids takes more than 180 days a year. It takes a village to raise a kid. Think of all the things you learned from your parents, your extended family, your sports coach, your neighbor, or the manager of the corner store you frequented. Did you ever have a lesson at school about tying your shoe laces? How did you learn that advertisements don't have tell the truth?
Teaching to the test is about pulling low achieving students up to standard, not so much about supporting high performing students. Even though a lot of difference between a good school district and bad school district comes down to out of classroom factors like socioeconomic class and parental involvement, the district gets praise or blame. The district can't fix food insecurity, absent parents, abuse, and anti-intellectual attitudes. But it can focus those 180 days on reading and math and specifically what's on the test.
My parents beat me when I disappointed them. It takes a village to turn their back on apparent and obvious child abuse too. This is probably why I find it difficult to put on what I perceive to be the standard issue hacker news rose colored glasses.
You've completely avoided the topic of money. Presumably we have to pay these teachers somehow. The way we've decided to do this is inimical to all the things you've otherwise described.
It may just be me, but it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones.
That being said, I’ve enjoyed wearing my analog watch the last few years to tell time instead of having to pull out my phone all the time. Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way…
Almost all wall clocks sold here are analogue ones. And they are in almost every home and public place. (Looking at the clock section in the hardware store and the municipality Office/train station combination)
Most digital clocks are alarms. As soon as it becomes a computer and not primary a time device it becomes more digital.
> Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way…
How so? Like, using them as clocks? If a Switch fit in my pocket and showed me the time when I pulled it out without even having to press the power button or interact with it, I guess I can't see why I wouldn't do that?
I think some cultures (especially sub Saharan ones) didn’t really have a concept of precise time in their language. It’s lead to things like “Africa time”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time
I think we all suffer from a lot of bias and assumptions about how other cultures operate. I also wonder if above article correlates with race - similar to a lot of other recent declining US education stats, it tracks pretty well with white % of population going down.
We also see thousands of other things everyday. You can't be curious about everything.
Analog clocks, roman numerals and Morse code are unnecessary in modern living for 99%+ people, just like it's unnecessary for them to know why the moon always faces the same way or how a car engine works or what technologies are used by their computer monitor. It's good to know these facts exist and that they can be learned, but that's about it.
That was my point, although I might've written it poorly. You can't go and learn everything. We're surrounded and bombarded by so much information, so many different things every day. Even very intelligent and curious people who read and learn all the time don't know everything. Just sitting at my desk I can probably think of 1000 things that pique my interest, but I don't try to learn about them because I know I have a very limited life on this planet. It's impossible to know everything, even to read all of Wikipedia.
One thing that's tricky about analog clocks if you're not used to them - the hour hand sweeps unnecessarily over the course of an hour so you have to find the hour hand then go backwards. We have the technology to make clocks where the hour hand actually points to the hour that it is. I don't understand why the jump hour feature isn't more common.
Some (the worst) clocks do that.. It's convenient that the hour hand is moving continuously because it means that unless you need to be able to say "it's five seconds past two minutes past four _in the morning_", you simply look at the hour hand, if it's in the middle of two hours, well it's half past the smaller.. if it's one forth past the smaller, it's.. yes, quarter past.. if it's one forth from the larger then it's quarter to.. and well, honestly, if you need to read the time more precisely than that and chose to use an analogue clock for it, you've chosen the wrong type of clock, a digital clock with seconds and 24 hour display is a superior tool for telling the time anyway.
That would make it discontinuous, which means there's no information beyond the integer.
I think, though I don't know how I'd prove, that anyone truly used to an analogue wristwatch probably only looks at the hour hand when casually checking.
I disagree with this. I read analogue clocks without having to do any conscious mental effort, but the minute hand is definitely a part of it.
If I have to think about how I parse them, I think the minute hand is more important than the hour hand. I'm usually roughly aware of what hour it is, and if I'm looking at a clock, it's to know what minute it is.
That's a good point. The hour hand moves continuously as an artifact of technical constraints on the original clocks -- which I think is a great example of achieving a balance between UI and technical feasibility -- but we don't technically need them to work that way anymore, and digital clocks work exactly like that.
With that said, it's not obvious that we should use the jump hour UI[1]. It's desirable to have the hour hand be close to 4 when it's close to 4 o'clock. Like the neighbor comment says, that prevents you from confusing 4:58 with ~4.
Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem. Certainly easier that shrinking an accurate mechanical time keeping device down to wrist watch size.
For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.
If there was a strong demand for such a product, they would have caught on before the 7 segment display made them the cheapest option. Possibly as a luxury or status symbol depending on how the cost worked out.
Not sure it's entirely relevant, but I'm pretty sure that research done for instrumentation in aeroplane flight decks shows that information is transferred faster and more reliably from the instruments to the pilots when it's analogue.
That's why even the modern glass/digital instrument panels have simulated "tape".
They also include digital readouts for added accuracy, but it's the analogue versions that transfer information "at a glance".
Not sure about which one is faster to read for a static value - most analog simulated instruments are relative which means you still need to read a digital readout to get the absolute value.
One thing analog instruments/tapes do that a simple digital readout won’t is they easily communicate the rate of change of the value.
I remember in 3rd or 4th grade I felt sure I knew how to read a clock (then usually analog) until the teacher started a formal classroom unit to teach us. I realized that I had only understood how to read the hour hand but not the minute or second hands. Illusion of competence or illusion of depth or something.
> That's a major skill that they're not used to at all
how major is it really? seems incredibly limited in its use, and largely unnecessary in the modern world, with the existence of digital clocks (especially 24 hour ones!)
I expect it will go the way of telephone rotary dials etc - something you could learn in under an hour but have no reason to...
I have experience with an IB school in Europe - the kids have a special unit about clocks (analog and digital) in their math class in fourth grade. The student books have a lot of problems involving reading both types of clocks and calculating diffenreces between two clocks in hours/minutes/seconds.
Not a student in any of those countries, but speaking as a Canadian: I was taught how to read a clock in early grade school (grade 1, I believe?), and retain this ability now. I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years given that I tend to keep my phone on me much more often than before. I believe that most Canadian kids were probably taught to read a clock, but by high school when everybody has phones there's not much reason to.
> I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years
Do you really see that? If a numberless analogue clock turned up in a society that had the same time system but had only ever used digital clocks, how long would it take to figure out how to read it? I'm fairly confident a logical person would figure it out in far less than an hour, and for you to relearn it: about 2 minutes. Once you perceive the movement of one hand you're there. For kids, learning the clock is also learning about time, numbers and fractions, so I'm assuming you won't also forget those things.
What I mean by "forget" is more about losing fluency. Right now when I look at a clock, I can have the hour in around half of a second and the minute in another half a second. But I know that a) I was faster a few years ago and that b) this trend for me will likely not reverse.
I'm honestly baffled at this either revelation or a meme, being reposted over past few years, about modern teenagers unable to recognize or use some tech predating them. I was born around 90s and never had to use for example a typewriter or punch-cards or 8" diskettes, but I could recognize all that stuff without any training since my childhood. Same with most other gadgets from before my generation.
How come kids are supposedly can't recognize a rotary phone for example? Or an analog clock?
Is it really important that people be educated in the reading of analog clocks?
I think it's clear to most people that digital clocks are easier to read - they're numbers that you read the same as any other numbers; they can be read at a glance without special training.
Analog clocks can also be read at a glance but require the reader to acquire a non-transferable skill.
When I was growing up (90's, 00's), digital clocks weren't yet ubiquitous the way they are now so I can understand why they were taught to me as a child but in 2025, I suspect the average adult finds a digital clock within their line of sight ~20x more frequently than any kind of analog clock.
If you read this and still think it's important that children learn how to read analog clocks, I'd like to know: assuming digital clocks continue their growth and analog clocks become less and less common, when exactly can we stop teaching analog clocks?
In a similar vein, if there's anyone around here who learned the abacus in school, I'm curious what you think of this. Is the analog clock the abacus, waiting to be phased out in favour of the calculator, or is there another way to look at it?
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are ...
... so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
When I was a kid, before kinder garden, I remember my parents beginning to teach me how to read an analogue clock.. But I this was the late 80s, maybe it was 1990, but, this thing called Digital Clocks were a thing at the time.. And I absolutely refused to learn that old fashioned shit when I was already staring right at the objectively better solution.. My reasoning was that the old clocks would either be replaced by digital clocks within a short time, and those that weren't replace would be when they broke (5 year old me didn't grasp the idea that people would continue buying the obviously inferior products until this very day), honestly, I'm still a bit perplexed by the fact that one can buy an analogue clock today.. It's objectively inferior in every way.. Most of them don't even do 24 hours, which, is the amount of hours we have in a day, leading some idiots to refer to 18:00 as "six-o-clock", and other idiots (like myself) to have to ask EVERY_TIME someone tells me a time that's less than, or equal to 12.. fuck that shit.
Yeah, I learned how to read inferior clocks, but.. I don't see the point.
So no, it's not that those students can't read a clock, they just can't read an analogue one, because they're probably need to as often as they need to read an octal clock, or a binary led clock, or a 24 hour dial clock, or Chinese..
Years ago I once wasted 2 hours arriving at 07:00 instead of 19:00. The AM/PM stuff is ridiculous, especially when people don't specify it. It was the time we were going to leave for a trip, so 07:00 or 19:00 were all acceptable times. So 24-hour time is obviously better. Most people don't even bother saying "AM" or "PM" if it even exists in their language or culture.
I think analog clocks are mostly for old people who don't like change, for people nostalgic for the past, for people who think like it makes them better, smarter, fancier of classier somehow - especially with expensive mechanical analog watches.
I feel like most of these comments have ignored the article. They were taught how to read clocks, in first and second grade. Then they had no need of the skill for most of a decade and it atrophied. I suspect many would struggle to remember some of the things we had down well in elementary school, like writing fully in cursive, knowing the difference between types of rocks and clouds, or giving some full speech you had to memorize at the time (it was Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty" speech for me). And if you're someone who does know the difference between your cumulonimbus, cirrocumulus and such, rad! But do you suspect most of your peers remember?
I think the better question is, and the article poses this, why are students not bothering to refresh the skill now that it's necessary again?
This makes me wonder what methods of transferring information we may have lost historically that we don't even recognize?
Will there be analog clocks in 30 years? It seems somewhat doubtful, particularly if this generation can't read them.
What benefit is there to keep this antiquated method around, aside from just as an historical reference?
I'm in my 50s, so I can read an analog clock, and I have analog watches. But I don't feel the need to force this method of time on future generations.
Digital clocks are not subject to the drift that analog clocks are, they don't require the user to learn to read them, and if they are broken, it is fairly obvious at first glance.
What benefit does an analog clock have, aside from that it can work without power? And even then, it's only those that are purely mechanical, which I think is also dying out.
> This makes me wonder what methods of transferring information we may have lost historically that we don't even recognize?
- Gregg shorthand.
- Labanotation (like music scores, but for dance)
- Morse code
- Punched tickets (not for machines, but for train tickets and bus transfers)
- Railroad car chalk markings (where does this car go?)
- Hand signals for railroad yards, cranes, etc.
The power thing is a red herring. "Analog" clocks are almost always electric and digital under the hood. And battery technology has been good enough for them to stay powered for longer than actual analog clocks for decades. If you really wanted to, you can create an entirely mechanical digital clock.
The main benefit of the analog style output is in the ability to quickly read the output. You can get an approximate sense of the time with a much quicker glance, even if determining the time to the minute takes longer than with a digital display.
Probably just auto-correct ... but it's "red herring".
Luxury watches are analog. Maybe people 50 years from now won't even know if the clock is telling the time correctly and will just wear the watch to show off...
50 years from now? this is already absolutely a thing.
Maybe you're right. Even if the clock is off, I always assumed the wearer was at least able to read an analog clock.
The future is now. I personally know someone who does that. It's a fancy watch that only gets worn sometimes. And it's an automatic so it needs to be moved for it to keep running. So when they wear it every few days it is completely out of sync and they can't be bothered to adjust the time.
It is purely an accessory and completely useless for telling the time.
No judgment, but it just seems silly.
Apparently the correct way to solve it is to store the watch in a cradle that keeps it moving perpetually.
I inherited a mechanical watch from my grandmother and I can't stand it when it's even 1 minute off, haha
I'm quite young so I didn't really live with analog clocks but I got used to it because the watch is cool and I might as make it useful...
> Will there be analog clocks in 30 years? It seems somewhat doubtful, particularly if this generation can't read them.
I wish there was an analog clock face available for iOS on the lock screen.
Cursive writing first that comes to my mind.
My kids are spending hours of class time in school learning Roman numerals. The correct amount of education about Roman numerals is a short form video of math trivia when you're 23. Zero classroom time should be wasted on an inferior system of numerals.
Learning to read Roman numerals is secretly an exercise in mental arithmetic. You're summing numbers in your head as you go, and occasionally you'll need to keep that sum off to the side while you subtract a second number from a third. So rather than viewing it as time wasted on learning an obsolete numeral system, instead consider it as a different way to frame a math exercise.
How would one possibly hope to keep the Final Fantasy series straight without knowing Roman numerals?? It's already challenging knowing them
And how would they participate in America's annual roman numeral challenge, The Super Bowl!
When the count hit 50, it was felt by the NFL branding people that "Super Bowl L" would be too confusing. So it was just called "Super Bowl 50".
I wonder if that's the modern equivalent to the Simpsons' "Rocky V plus Rocky II" joke.
Just refer to this handy guide: https://youtu.be/8o1ieehttdA Oh wait that's Kingdom Hearts. Same difference.
This is why God created ChatGPT.
\s
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It's not about forcing anything onto anyone, it's about teaching useful skills (at school or at home). Analog clocks are sufficiently common to make how to read them an useful skill.
This framing aggravates me.
Of course they /can/ read clocks. You just haven't _taught_ them how to do it yet, and up until now, they've had no reason to do it.
It's divisive and weird.
I've worked in schools, we only have analogue clocks, phones are banned and I'm still constantly asked the time as they don't want to read them.
Teaching them to do it is tough because it's incredibly uninteresting to them and someone will have a watch or something
We got taught in first and second grade, reading maps and navigating by them included. Was neccessity for Schnitzeljagd and other scavenger hunt-type games. But, to be fair, most kids already knew how to read timepieces.
Bullshit. Information is everywhere, if they WANTED to learn how to read them they could go on wikipedia or youtube.
That excuse could've worked when I was a teenager, where to learn something you have to either learn it from a person or from a book, but not nowadays.
Is learning how to read an analogue clock really an effective use of one's time? I myself was taught how an am able to read an analogue clock, but I doubt that I would be much worse off without that abulity.
Why learn anything, just ask chatgpt gang, amirite.
Do you know how to use a fountain pen? Do you know how to tell your position by the stars? Do you know how to start a fire with sticks and stones? Life's too short to spend it hoarding trivia.
Right, just ask chatgpt gang amirite yolo
Children need instruction, they’re not born with an inbuilt list of things they should probably learn and the desire to go and learn them without guidance.
If we were talking about 6 year olds I wouldn't made this comment. Plenty of teenagers are curious about the world around them. The ones that can't read a clock, aren't. By the time people get to their teens there's already a huge huge range of interests and yes, IQ too.
Relying on ‘plenty of children are curious enough to be motivated to go figure it out’ as a teaching strategy is pretty wild.
Teenagers.
They’re still children and regardless of your definition, my statement still applies.
Not necessarily.
You're trying to play with words to make it sound like what I'm saying is crazy, but you're doing it incorrectly. Not all teenagers are children, no.
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> “That's a major skill that they're not used to at all,” she said.
i get it but I don’t know if I would catastrophize this, because analog clock reading is borderline anachronistic and can be taught and learned in probably an hour.
30% of NYC public school students are functionally illiterate in high school. There is zero chance you will be able to teach them analog clock in a day and forget about an hour.
The discussion about this on the teachers subreddit repeated the claim of 'Of course they can't read a clock, NY teachers are only allowed to teach things that are explicitly specified on any of the syllabi or tests and reading a clock isn't on the list.'. The other internet fora for teachers have exactly as much cynicism as you'd expect too, but there is an implied grain of truth:
Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded. RAND estimated K-12 unexplained absences reached 21% in 2023 and early estimates for the last year suggest that strong attention to fixing it has brought it down to 13%, which is an improvement but is still way too high.
> Teachers don't have the time to meaningfully teach anything except the test contents, because truancy has exploded.
That buries the lede. Why don't they have time? Isn't education their goal? Or is test taking their goal? And why? Is it because the school gets federal funding based on test results and student attendance?
We've ruined schools the same way the British found the Cobra Effect. We've created entirely the wrong incentives for everyone involved.
Educating and socializing kids takes more than 180 days a year. It takes a village to raise a kid. Think of all the things you learned from your parents, your extended family, your sports coach, your neighbor, or the manager of the corner store you frequented. Did you ever have a lesson at school about tying your shoe laces? How did you learn that advertisements don't have tell the truth?
Teaching to the test is about pulling low achieving students up to standard, not so much about supporting high performing students. Even though a lot of difference between a good school district and bad school district comes down to out of classroom factors like socioeconomic class and parental involvement, the district gets praise or blame. The district can't fix food insecurity, absent parents, abuse, and anti-intellectual attitudes. But it can focus those 180 days on reading and math and specifically what's on the test.
My parents beat me when I disappointed them. It takes a village to turn their back on apparent and obvious child abuse too. This is probably why I find it difficult to put on what I perceive to be the standard issue hacker news rose colored glasses.
You've completely avoided the topic of money. Presumably we have to pay these teachers somehow. The way we've decided to do this is inimical to all the things you've otherwise described.
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Maybe so but children/teenagers also have parents and it is problematic when parents pass the buck to schools to teach their children everything.
It may just be me, but it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones.
That being said, I’ve enjoyed wearing my analog watch the last few years to tell time instead of having to pull out my phone all the time. Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way…
Almost all wall clocks sold here are analogue ones. And they are in almost every home and public place. (Looking at the clock section in the hardware store and the municipality Office/train station combination)
Most digital clocks are alarms. As soon as it becomes a computer and not primary a time device it becomes more digital.
> it seems like digital clocks have been replacing analog clocks long before smartphones
Have been but haven’t and likely never will given analog clocks are beautiful.
Reading clocks is simple. Creating a class and educational divide around it is silly. Doing so unintentionally is insane.
(And I assume there are more analog clocks lurking in the shadows.)
> Imagine if we used our Steam decks and Switches the same way…
How so? Like, using them as clocks? If a Switch fit in my pocket and showed me the time when I pulled it out without even having to press the power button or interact with it, I guess I can't see why I wouldn't do that?
What boggles my mind is that some people see clocks everyday and don't have the curiosity to go learn about it.
I think some cultures (especially sub Saharan ones) didn’t really have a concept of precise time in their language. It’s lead to things like “Africa time”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time
I think we all suffer from a lot of bias and assumptions about how other cultures operate. I also wonder if above article correlates with race - similar to a lot of other recent declining US education stats, it tracks pretty well with white % of population going down.
We also see thousands of other things everyday. You can't be curious about everything.
Analog clocks, roman numerals and Morse code are unnecessary in modern living for 99%+ people, just like it's unnecessary for them to know why the moon always faces the same way or how a car engine works or what technologies are used by their computer monitor. It's good to know these facts exist and that they can be learned, but that's about it.
For some that's about it, and others just go and learn them because they're interested.
That was my point, although I might've written it poorly. You can't go and learn everything. We're surrounded and bombarded by so much information, so many different things every day. Even very intelligent and curious people who read and learn all the time don't know everything. Just sitting at my desk I can probably think of 1000 things that pique my interest, but I don't try to learn about them because I know I have a very limited life on this planet. It's impossible to know everything, even to read all of Wikipedia.
One thing that's tricky about analog clocks if you're not used to them - the hour hand sweeps unnecessarily over the course of an hour so you have to find the hour hand then go backwards. We have the technology to make clocks where the hour hand actually points to the hour that it is. I don't understand why the jump hour feature isn't more common.
Some (the worst) clocks do that.. It's convenient that the hour hand is moving continuously because it means that unless you need to be able to say "it's five seconds past two minutes past four _in the morning_", you simply look at the hour hand, if it's in the middle of two hours, well it's half past the smaller.. if it's one forth past the smaller, it's.. yes, quarter past.. if it's one forth from the larger then it's quarter to.. and well, honestly, if you need to read the time more precisely than that and chose to use an analogue clock for it, you've chosen the wrong type of clock, a digital clock with seconds and 24 hour display is a superior tool for telling the time anyway.
That would make it discontinuous, which means there's no information beyond the integer.
I think, though I don't know how I'd prove, that anyone truly used to an analogue wristwatch probably only looks at the hour hand when casually checking.
Many watches don't even have face markings.
I disagree with this. I read analogue clocks without having to do any conscious mental effort, but the minute hand is definitely a part of it.
If I have to think about how I parse them, I think the minute hand is more important than the hour hand. I'm usually roughly aware of what hour it is, and if I'm looking at a clock, it's to know what minute it is.
Wouldn't 4:58 with jump hour look too much like 4:00?
That's a good point. The hour hand moves continuously as an artifact of technical constraints on the original clocks -- which I think is a great example of achieving a balance between UI and technical feasibility -- but we don't technically need them to work that way anymore, and digital clocks work exactly like that.
With that said, it's not obvious that we should use the jump hour UI[1]. It's desirable to have the hour hand be close to 4 when it's close to 4 o'clock. Like the neighbor comment says, that prevents you from confusing 4:58 with ~4.
[1] See my "continuity heuristic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11687391
Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem. Certainly easier that shrinking an accurate mechanical time keeping device down to wrist watch size.
For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.
If there was a strong demand for such a product, they would have caught on before the 7 segment display made them the cheapest option. Possibly as a luxury or status symbol depending on how the cost worked out.
>Having discrete jumps on a mechanical analog clock is not a particularly hard problem.
I meant at the creation of the first clocks.
>For that matter getting a purely digital display out of a mechanical clock is not diffucult either either.
I don't know where I implied otherwise.
Not sure it's entirely relevant, but I'm pretty sure that research done for instrumentation in aeroplane flight decks shows that information is transferred faster and more reliably from the instruments to the pilots when it's analogue.
That's why even the modern glass/digital instrument panels have simulated "tape".
They also include digital readouts for added accuracy, but it's the analogue versions that transfer information "at a glance".
Not sure about which one is faster to read for a static value - most analog simulated instruments are relative which means you still need to read a digital readout to get the absolute value.
One thing analog instruments/tapes do that a simple digital readout won’t is they easily communicate the rate of change of the value.
I remember in 3rd or 4th grade I felt sure I knew how to read a clock (then usually analog) until the teacher started a formal classroom unit to teach us. I realized that I had only understood how to read the hour hand but not the minute or second hands. Illusion of competence or illusion of depth or something.
> That's a major skill that they're not used to at all
how major is it really? seems incredibly limited in its use, and largely unnecessary in the modern world, with the existence of digital clocks (especially 24 hour ones!)
I expect it will go the way of telephone rotary dials etc - something you could learn in under an hour but have no reason to...
The fact that US children doesn't know how to read clocks doesn't surprise me, but what about other countries?
Is reading a clock taught to students in India, Japan, China, Chile?
I have experience with an IB school in Europe - the kids have a special unit about clocks (analog and digital) in their math class in fourth grade. The student books have a lot of problems involving reading both types of clocks and calculating diffenreces between two clocks in hours/minutes/seconds.
Not a student in any of those countries, but speaking as a Canadian: I was taught how to read a clock in early grade school (grade 1, I believe?), and retain this ability now. I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years given that I tend to keep my phone on me much more often than before. I believe that most Canadian kids were probably taught to read a clock, but by high school when everybody has phones there's not much reason to.
> I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years
Do you really see that? If a numberless analogue clock turned up in a society that had the same time system but had only ever used digital clocks, how long would it take to figure out how to read it? I'm fairly confident a logical person would figure it out in far less than an hour, and for you to relearn it: about 2 minutes. Once you perceive the movement of one hand you're there. For kids, learning the clock is also learning about time, numbers and fractions, so I'm assuming you won't also forget those things.
What I mean by "forget" is more about losing fluency. Right now when I look at a clock, I can have the hour in around half of a second and the minute in another half a second. But I know that a) I was faster a few years ago and that b) this trend for me will likely not reverse.
I don’t know about other countries, but it is taught in India in a few schools I am exposed to.
Analog wall clocks are fairly common in most Indian households.
Aren't most children taught how to read them by parents, not in schools?
I'm honestly baffled at this either revelation or a meme, being reposted over past few years, about modern teenagers unable to recognize or use some tech predating them. I was born around 90s and never had to use for example a typewriter or punch-cards or 8" diskettes, but I could recognize all that stuff without any training since my childhood. Same with most other gadgets from before my generation.
How come kids are supposedly can't recognize a rotary phone for example? Or an analog clock?
Is it really important that people be educated in the reading of analog clocks?
I think it's clear to most people that digital clocks are easier to read - they're numbers that you read the same as any other numbers; they can be read at a glance without special training.
Analog clocks can also be read at a glance but require the reader to acquire a non-transferable skill.
When I was growing up (90's, 00's), digital clocks weren't yet ubiquitous the way they are now so I can understand why they were taught to me as a child but in 2025, I suspect the average adult finds a digital clock within their line of sight ~20x more frequently than any kind of analog clock.
If you read this and still think it's important that children learn how to read analog clocks, I'd like to know: assuming digital clocks continue their growth and analog clocks become less and less common, when exactly can we stop teaching analog clocks?
In a similar vein, if there's anyone around here who learned the abacus in school, I'm curious what you think of this. Is the analog clock the abacus, waiting to be phased out in favour of the calculator, or is there another way to look at it?
this reminds me of learning cursive
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are ...
... so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
When I was a kid, before kinder garden, I remember my parents beginning to teach me how to read an analogue clock.. But I this was the late 80s, maybe it was 1990, but, this thing called Digital Clocks were a thing at the time.. And I absolutely refused to learn that old fashioned shit when I was already staring right at the objectively better solution.. My reasoning was that the old clocks would either be replaced by digital clocks within a short time, and those that weren't replace would be when they broke (5 year old me didn't grasp the idea that people would continue buying the obviously inferior products until this very day), honestly, I'm still a bit perplexed by the fact that one can buy an analogue clock today.. It's objectively inferior in every way.. Most of them don't even do 24 hours, which, is the amount of hours we have in a day, leading some idiots to refer to 18:00 as "six-o-clock", and other idiots (like myself) to have to ask EVERY_TIME someone tells me a time that's less than, or equal to 12.. fuck that shit.
Yeah, I learned how to read inferior clocks, but.. I don't see the point.
So no, it's not that those students can't read a clock, they just can't read an analogue one, because they're probably need to as often as they need to read an octal clock, or a binary led clock, or a 24 hour dial clock, or Chinese..
Years ago I once wasted 2 hours arriving at 07:00 instead of 19:00. The AM/PM stuff is ridiculous, especially when people don't specify it. It was the time we were going to leave for a trip, so 07:00 or 19:00 were all acceptable times. So 24-hour time is obviously better. Most people don't even bother saying "AM" or "PM" if it even exists in their language or culture.
I think analog clocks are mostly for old people who don't like change, for people nostalgic for the past, for people who think like it makes them better, smarter, fancier of classier somehow - especially with expensive mechanical analog watches.
Excuse me while I prima facie dismiss a kindergartner’s opinion on what is an “objectively” superior/inferior system.
It’s your opinion and prerogative, don’t try to masquerade it as settled truth.
Wow, you must have been violated by an analog clock somewhere sometime. It left a visible trauma. Go get help.