At least 31 states and the District of Columbia restrict cell phones in schools
New York City teachers say the state’s recently implemented cell phone ban in schools has showed that numerous students no longer know how to tell time on an old-fashioned clock.
“That’s a major skill that they’re not used to at all,” Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, told Gothamist of what she’s noticed after the ban, which went into effect in September.
Students in the city’s school system are meant to learn basic time-telling skills in the first and second grade, according to officials, though it appears children have fallen out of practice doing so in an increasingly digital world.
Digital clocks have way less time drift too so they require less manual adjusting. It’s still a good idea to know it though, we have way too many analogue clocks out in the world and some of them have beautiful aesthetics.
That’s not necessarily true, how clocks display time, and how they maintain time don’t have to match up. You can get digital or analog clocks that keep time by setting them then using a quartz clock to count the passage of time. You can also get digital or analog clocks that talk to a network time server, and can keep within tens to low hundreds of milliseconds easily. Gear-driven analog clocks are reasonably common, and you can even find a gear-driven clock with a digital face, though those are more of a gimmick.
Obviously, a clock with an analog face that speaks NTP is digital electronics, and there’s a certain aesthetic loss, in that something like a grandfather clock that does this is a silly thing to make. But you absolutely could if you wanted to.