We are all familiar with the common Old gripe about how Kids These Days can’t read analog clocks. This is a true thing about young people, but I genuinely have a hard time caring about it too much. Reading analog clocks is a skill that is easy to pick up when it becomes necessary and it is kind of hard to imagine how one’s life might genuinely be impacted by an inability to read one. Also, if you really want to make these people sputter, ask them if they can use a slide rule or an abacus, because Kids These Days can’t read clocks for exactly the same reason that most old people can’t use slide rules or abaci any longer.

That said, I have a complaint about young people and telling time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone else griping about it anywhere, so I demand credit when this becomes the new big complaint about The Yoots. Who are an entirely distinct group of humans from The Roots, despite what my autocorrect might think.

Kids these days have an almost frightening inability to deal with chronal inconsistency.

Perhaps I should explain.

Anyone who grew up in a world with analog clocks and analog watches and VCRs and anything that had to have its time set manually got used to the idea that we were never 100% sure what time it was, and it didn’t really matter. You might have ten different clocks or watches in your house and even assuming your VCR or your microwave wasn’t flashing 12:00 all the time, those ten clocks were probably displaying at least three or four different times. Even worse, sometimes we set clocks a few minutes fast on purpose! I only recently broke myself of the habit of setting the clock in my car ahead a few minutes, because never once did it actually help me get somewhere on time, which was supposed to be the whole point of doing such a thing.

Maybe it was 10:02. Maybe it was 10:03 or 10:01, or maybe it was 10:05! It really didn’t matter. Unless you were trying to catch a TV show at a specific time, being off by a minute or two was just never a big deal. Remember how sometimes in movies or TV shows they’d have a moment where they made a big deal about synchronizing watches? When was the last time you saw someone do that?

My son will occasionally ask me what time it is. I will look at my watch and, in the manner of an Old, I will probably round a little bit rather than provide him the precise time. Woe betide me if he happens to glance at a clock and notice I was wrong. It’s the same thing if I’m telling him how long he has to do something. “You’ve got ten minutes.” If I approach him again at minute nine, we have a problem.

Now, you might think that’s just my kid? Nah. I put up a new digital clock in my classroom this year, which previously, in the manner of most school classrooms, only had an analog clock above the door, which, remember, a lot of them can’t read. If that clock is one minute off from the time their iPads tell them it is– which is the same time their watches tell them, which is the same time their phones tell them, and there’s not even an iPhone/Android divide here because they all pull the Actual Time from the same place– I start hearing about it. And they cannot comprehend why I am not constantly adjusting the clock in my classroom to precisely synchronize with the bell schedule or the Real Time on their devices. I, an Old, don’t give a shit about a clock being a minute off. My students, Youngs one and all, absolutely cannot handle the ambiguity. It’s not just one kid and it’s not just one class. It happens all the time. I’m at the point where I’m going to set the thing an hour off just to see if any of them die from it.

These kids have Known the Time for their entire lives. They have always had constant access to a device that hooks up to the One True Time, a molecular clock in, I dunno, I assume Switzerland or some shit like that, and every device they have agrees on what time it is, always. And they cannot find a way to live like we lived. And it’s hilarious.

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Someone solved the math question I posted yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised with the percentage of my students who noticed on their own that I’d put the answers to today’s assignment on the board. I did end up working a couple of them out for students, just to prove that I was asking them something that they knew how to do, even if it was a pain in the ass. Here, with only a couple of shortcuts that I assume any adult mathematician can handle, is the full solution to the equation. Please forgive my crappy handwriting, especially the way all the Vs look like check marks and that really sloppy 5 in the first line: