Teenagers need helping hand to tell the time
School launches lessons after finding pupils at a loss with traditional timepiece thanks to digital devices
IT HAS long been a rite of passage for young children – the moment they first begin to grasp how to tell the time as their parents patiently explain the significance of the “big hand” and the “little hand”.
But the ubiquity of mobile phones and tablets, with their digital 24-hour clock, is threatening to make the art of telling the time from a traditional timepiece redundant.
So much so that a school in Scotland has found that pupils as old as 13 are unable to tell the time from analogue clocks in classrooms and corridors.
Teachers at Kilgraston School in Perthshire began to notice that more and more of its senior pupils had no concept of how to read a clock.
The problem had become so acute that it had even begun to threaten the girls’ exam prospects.
Dorothy MacGinty, head of Kilgraston, said: “Pupils sit in examination rooms with analogue clocks and we have found some who struggle to understand how much longer they have left for an exam because they cannot read the clock face.”
Now the school, in the town of Bridge of Earn, has begun to teach pupils to tell the time the old-fashioned way. Mobile phones and tablets have been banned during school hours to encourage the girls to look at clocks.
Teachers began to notice that it was taking longer than normal to teach junior pupils at the school how to tell the time, either because they were not being taught at home or were not receiving “regular reinforcement” from looking at their watches.
However, it quickly became clear the problem was not limited to the younger pupils.
Mrs MacGinty said: “Our head of maths, Mrs Stephanie Speed, mentioned to me that she was also becoming increasingly concerned as more and more senior girls who were joining the school lacked this basic skill.
“Additionally, there are maths applications that need this skill. We are encouraging parents and guardians to buy watches for girls from aged five.”
These are pupils who have happily mastered complex calculus and equations that would stump the majority of adults, she said.
The shift from analogue to digital technology has created a divide in everyday knowledge, but Mrs MacGinty insists there are some skills that should transcend the generations.
“Society is changing and the curriculum should change to reflect this,” she said. “But some skills are too important to ignore. For example, we are still teaching pupils to read rail and bus timetables, even though it is no longer in the senior school maths syllabus, because it is important that pupils understand how to read these.”
Since many of the pupils at the independent day and boarding school, founded in 1930, do not own a wristwatch, they were initially reluctant about being separated from their mobile phones during the day.
But it appears the rule has had the desired effect of encouraging them to look up at a clock to tell the time.
“Initially I felt anxious about learning to read the time,” said one 13-yearold. “Now that I understand it, and we don’t carry phones with us, I find myself using the classroom and corridor clocks to read all the time.”
Mrs MacGinty added: “Wouldn’t it be very sad if we got to the point where a whole generation of young people looked at Big Ben in puzzlement?”