this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Of course the kids don't know how to read them. Kids rarely encounter analog clocks and when they do, they have several digital clocks within arms length. Most people wouldn't reach for a slide rule when they have a calculator.
And to be fair, analog clocks are objectively worse than digital clocks in every way aside from aesthetics.
I grew up around both, for simply telling time, digital is far better. Analog though to me gives a better sense of the passage of time I guess you could call it? Like, you can see the hour hand has moved a distance after a little while; or if I want to do something for half an hour, I just have to watch for when the minute hand is pointing 180 degrees away from where it was when I started, things like that.
My kid has analog clocks on her school tests and homework as questions. They are teaching them to read them, most just don't care for the reasons you stated.
When I was in elementary school, my teacher asked us which kind of clock is easier to read. I said "digital, because it shows the numbers". She told me "no, analog is easier to read, because you just look at it and know the time without reading the numbers".
I thought that was stupid back then, and it's still stupid now, because I have to calculate the time whenever I need to read an analog clock. Still can't read them quickly.
As someone who now prefers digital, but grew up with mostly analog, I think I can understand what your teacher was trying to say, and it's really a difference in how the brain is interpreting time itself.
When your internal mental state of time is represented in numbers, then analog clocks feel awkward and clunky, because to use them you have to look at the clock, think "okay the big hand is here, the little hand is there, so that's 7:45. School starts at 8, so 15 mins to school". It's like having to translate through a foreign language and then back to your own.
For people who use analog clocks almost exclusively, as I did in childhood, then your concept of time actually begins to become directly correlated to the position of the hands themselves. Not the numbers the hands are pointing at, but the shape the hands make on the clock face. I think what your elementary teacher was trying to say is that the clock itself becomes a direct physical representation of the 'size' of time.
Someone whose brain is working like that looks at an analog clock and immediately thinks "It's quarter to school" - without any numbers being involved at all. In fact you could completely remove all numbers and markings from the clock face, and the physical comprehension of time would still function equally as well for that person.
So yeah, I understand why analog is bad for people who don't like it, but I think I see the appeal for people who do.
If your mental model of time is based on analog clocks, then when looking at a digital clock you have to translate it back to clock hands to know what it means, and that's slower than immediately seeing the analog clock face.
Sure, but it's stupid to tell kids "objectively, analog is easier", especially when those kids most likely grew up with digital clocks.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's funny because I read a digital clock and visualise an analogue clock to understand the time better.
as someone with adhd I much prefer analogue clocks, they allow me to see time through physical distance of the clock hands which helps with perceiving it, numbers don't do that for me
100% yes! I have pretty intense time blindness due to ADHD. The visual representation of time in analog clocks helps me.