Time Challenged Tina: "When does this class end?" Me: "At a quarter after twelve."
Tina: "Quarter after twelve??? What do you mean? When does class end?"
Me: "Quarter after twelve, you know 12:15."
Tina: "Oh, 12:15, but what did you mean by quarter after???"
Me (drawing a circular clock divided into four quarters to illustrate this very complex topic): "Well there are 60 minutes in an hour so when you divide the hour up into four quarters, they are each 15 minutes long."
Tina: "But four quarters is a dollar."
Me: FACE PALM
Why I drink. Thank Jeebus Spring break starts tomorrow.
About ten years ago I noticed students not knowing the half past, quarter past markers. Now, most of my youngest students have never heard of that, been taught it, etc.
ReplyDeleteI've stopped saying it in class, and even when I say it in the real world I think, "Will they know what I mean?"
I've had students like Anne's say, "Quarter past 12? Do you mean 12:25?" Because, as they say, 25 cents in a quarter.
It would be interesting to see if they can figure out how to interpret geographic co-ordinates because degrees are sub-divided into minutes and seconds.
DeleteAnd just IMAGINE the obvious and every-day stuff our parents and grandparents know/knew and are/were astounded and horrified that we don't!
ReplyDeleteI think about this all the time. So much lost....
DeleteMy students are the same. I used to always say "quarter of twelve," etc., but it's no use anymore since nobody seems to know what it means.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not as if they haven't seen an analog clock face. Watches and bedside clocks are often digital these days (except for those manufactured for the retro-hipster market, which I thought included a fair share of our students -- or maybe those people are little older?), but I've yet to see a large digital wall clock in a college (or school). They still have round-faced clocks with hands -- the kind that can easily be divided into quarters, halves, etc.
ReplyDeleteMaybe our students don't have sufficient experienced with whole pies, and the dividing thereof?
but I've yet to see a large digital wall clock in a college (or school).
DeleteMy youngest's elementary school replaced all the analog clocks with digitals a few years ago. I wondered why it took so long. I don't think it's that big of a deal. Could you glance at a sundial and get within 30 minutes of the correct time? Don't forget to adjust for Daylight Savings Time, when/if applicable.
First of all, depending on precision and accuracy with which the sundial was made, possibly yes. Second of all, that's not even comparable...sundials are typically vestiges of ancient times. Our grandparents and even our great-grandparents probably didn't use them. Analog clocks are *still with us*. Many students wear them on their arms as watches and saw them every day in their classrooms growing up.
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I've seen elementary schools which installed big, old TVs in each classroom to broadcast announcements, lunch menus, etc. When there's no announcements, the TV shows an analog clock. A CRT TV showing an analog clock... Multiple levels of outdated technology boggles the mind. I should record a vinyl record of me taking a Polaroid picture of it.
DeleteThe reason why current undergrads can't read sundials is that they lack the brains to do it. I've given up trying to explain the equation of time (that the Sun can be early or late by as much as 8 minutes from being due south at noon in the Northern Hemisphere, because Earth's orbit isn't a circle, and its axis is inclined to the ecliptic): they simply cannot handle such complex thoughts.
DeleteFrod:
DeleteTry teaching a course with someone like that. I had that misfortune once. Both of us, by virtue of education, were qualified to teach the material. But my esteemed colleague couldn't wrap his mind around some basic concepts which he should have known. The result was that we didn't spend too much time on them or skipped them altogether.
Unfortunately, he eventually became an administrator with the result that I wasn't allowed to teach what he couldn't understand.
I'll add this to the list of things I'll have to teach my children myself.
ReplyDeleteIt makes one wonder how they can figure out what the terms "clockwise" and "counter-clockwise" mean.
ReplyDeleteFor the first few years at the place where I used to teach, most of the clocks were round and analog. There seemed to be an unwritten law that no 2 of them were ever supposed to show the same time. Whether any of them were right was another matter.
ReplyDeleteThis was particularly true for clocks in the building my office used to be in at first. We had several with 2 faces, one on each side, and, sure enough, one clock would show one time and the other one would be different by several minutes.
same here!
DeleteThat sounds like the administrators here at Podunk CC. Two-faced and never in sync with one another.
DeleteWe have analog clocks on the walls in our classrooms, and whoever sets them seems to really make an effort at accuracy.
DeleteIn the three classrooms I'm using this semester, the wall clocks are within about 5 seconds of the (internet-regulated) clocks on the classroom computers. It's pretty impressive.
The same (always-wrong) rule applies at my institution, with the bonus that, once one has learned to make allowance for the increment by which the clock is off, there will be a time change, and that increment will change also.
DeleteI think this phenomenon is partially due to the fact that wall clocks are often battery-driven, so there's (a) no way to coordinate them and (b) the potential for failing batteries to slow them down (though some are fast instead).
And one of my current classrooms has a clock that is slow *and* a teacher of the preceding class who seems to make it her mission in life to teach up to and beyond the last minute (and she seems to be teaching in our gateway program for ESL students, which means that they're both very polite/deferential, and probably don't have other classes to go to. So, unlike mine, they don't remind her by rustling around in their belongings or even simply leaving).
DeleteI very much hope that whoever mis-resets that clock sometime this weekend makes it fast.
The current undergrads can't tie shoelaces either, nor do they know the difference between "to," "two," and "too." God help us: I learned all of this in second grade.
ReplyDeleteI've had students who couldn't do basic algebra or trig and many of them were recent high school grads.
DeleteUnfortunately, I wasn't allowed to say anything about it to them because I might damage their self-esteem or intimidate them or some such nonsense.
Do they know that a gallon has four quarts? (Though why the U.S. didn't go metric decades ago is beyond me.)
ReplyDeleteOf course they don't. All they know is super-gulp (which Michael Bloomberg is trying to abolish), and family-size. The U.S. didn't go metric decades ago because it was one of those things that Jimmy Carter flailed around at, but was ineffective at changing.
DeleteIt's funny. Around the age that you start learning units of measure, I was living in a metric-standard place. So I never learned any of the imperial measurements in school, like how many feet in a mile and the way liquid measures work. When I moved back to the U.S., it was assumed knowledge and so I had to go and ask about them, which elicited bemused looks from my teachers who couldn't fathom why I didn't know the relationship between pints and cups.
DeleteI've got my imperial measurements down, except for the liquid measures aside from quarts and gallons. I know pints are the next step down, but can't keep straight how many go into a quart. I think it;s two. Google confirms my guess.