Time, time, time — see what’s become of me. While I look around for my possibilities…
— Hazy Shade of Winter, by Paul Simon
Despite having a ‘higher education’, I have no aptitude for math. My skills in that subject are at about a 6th grade arithmetic level.
Lack of ability in math has frustrated me throughout my life. More so in adulthood because analyzing the most complex legal doctrines and arguments comes easy for me. But despite my best efforts I just can’t grasp math beyond addin’, subtractin’, multiplyin’, and dividin’ — and then, only if it doesn’t involve fractions.
While convalescing from my heart attack I made a concerted effort to learn the subject. I started by reading The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, and The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements, then a biography of Sir Isaac Newton.
I got really ambitious and took a shot at Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Didn’t get far in to it before resigning myself to the reality that I just ain’t never gonna be no good at it!
So why am I babbling on about my ineptitude in math? Because I recently attended a dinner party seated between two math teachers — one of whom is retired, the other currently teaches elementary students.
Math (‘rithmetic) is one of the 3 R’s that should be the focus of elementary education – along with readin’ and ‘ritin’. Not indoctrination, as it too often is these days – and certainly not what pronouns to use. So my usual skepticism of teachers wasn’t present when talking with these two. I’m considering asking one of them to tutor me.
But the subject of this column isn’t my own math deficiency. It’s about the deficiency in a more fundamental skill among what seems to be an entire generation: how to tell time.
Yeah, I got the time straight with Mulligan. Whether Mulligan can tell time or not is another question.
— Clint Eastwood, Kelly’s Heroes.
The topic came up while discussing the difficulties of teaching today’s kids. I mentioned I’d read that apparently many of them can’t read a traditional clock. The current elementary teacher said that was correct — that she has to teach most of them how to read the clock on the wall of her classroom, because they don’t know how. She teaches 3rd and 4th graders.
(I guess the concept of clockwise vs counterclockwise is foreign to them as well. Good luck telling them how to loosen a lug nut to change a tire.)
Initially I thought… how is that possible? How can eight and nine year olds not know how to read a clock?
But then I realized three of the four clocks in my house — on the stove, the DVR, and in the bedroom — are all digital. The only clock with a ‘face’ is the one above where I sit typing this — with Snoopy and his best buddy Woodstock overlooking me from the center of the dial.
Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time. In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Until the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that the Greek word ώρα received the (Babylonian) significance of ‘ hour’.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
Replying to the younger teacher’s comment on having to teach her students to read a clock, the retired one said it reminded him of when calculators began to appear in classrooms. He made the students learn math first, then use the calculators to check their answers.
He speculated that some of today’s kids — who can’t read a clock that can be wound or move by weights (like a classic ‘grandfather’ clock) — will be SOL without power to run their digital clocks. Mechanical clocks have been in use since long before they were electrified. But maybe the kids won’t care.
Aside from not knowing how to read a clock, some members of the emerging generation (at least in our country) don’t seem to regard time as significant when it comes unimportant things — such as working. “Traditional work hours” aren’t relevant to them. They only want to work when they “feel productive”.
So I guess if you plan on just working when you “feel most productive”, the office clock on the wall isn’t really important. (Like a fool, I waited for retirement to work only when I feel like it.)
Time, time, time; see what’s become of me. While I looked around for my possibilities…
— Hazy Shade of Winter, Simon & Garfunkel
(I prefer The Bangles cover version. They are far more entertaining to watch than two guys just standing still singing.)
Now don’t get me wrong: I can relate to higher productivity during some hours. I’ve always been more productive in the evening than the morning. Most of my columns are written in the late evening.
But I also realize that for a society (and economy) to function, the majority of people have to work simultaneously the majority of the time. That means not everyone gets to work only during the hours they “feel productive”.
In my profession, for example, the Court system can’t function if all those working in it get to choose their own hours. When a judge who is “most productive” in the morning convenes court at 9am, we won’t get much done if one of the lawyers doesn’t start work until their most productive hours in the evening.
I also wonder how only working the hours certain people consider ‘productive’ portends for our competitiveness in a world economy? Companies in other countries, whose working age population don’t have the luxury of opting to be slackers (their cultures won’t tolerate it if they do) will out-work and out-produce us… the inevitable result being that workers here will have a lot of free time to schedule their lives — when their own companies go broke.
But I’m just an old ‘boomer’ who learned to tell time by looking at the orientation of Mickey’s hands on the watch I got when I started first grade — and still can’t do anything beyond basic math.
So why does what I think matter?