Can you use a slide rule? Can you edit a video? These were two of the questions that came to me when I heard news of anxious debate over the fact that some schools were switching to digital clocks in exam halls because “teenagers cannot tell the time”.
The story came about after comments from a former headteacher, Malcolm Trobe, now deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, who said “the current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations”. To help minimise stress in important exams, he has suggested switching to digital clocks.
As a maths teacher and a parent, I know that one of the requirements in the key stage 1 curriculum is for children to be taught how to read a traditional clock face. On questioning friends, teachers and students, I found few don’t achieve this. That older students might be finding calculating the time they have left in exams difficult is thus more likely about practice. For most pupils – and adults too – digital displays are simply more common, whether on train platforms, computer screens or mobile phones.
Trobe’s comments don’t appear to be backed up by any large-scale study, so I will offer the results of my own, rather unscientific, survey: although a couple got the time wrong before correcting themselves, all the teenagers I spoke to were able to read an analogue clock perfectly well. However, for many this wasn’t an embedded reflex – doing so required a level of thought akin to performing a calculation. They get there, but they have to think about it.
It therefore seems sensible for Trobe to suggest that, when students are meant to be focusing all their thinking on answering exam questions, they are shown the time in the way they are most familiar with.
However, this still leaves us with the deeper question as to why this change in timekeeping technology has caused such a furore. Nobody is suggesting that children have no idea what time is; the sense of outrage seems to be because the devices children are using aren’t the ones in common use 40 years ago.
I experienced the same exasperation when I was at school and my maths teacher discovered that none of us could use a slide rule. I remember the sneering dismissal of us as hopelessly stupid, the sigh that worried what the world was coming to.
In fact, when taught, we picked up the method quickly enough and enjoyed the nostalgic feel of using an “old” tool. But did we deem it a necessary skill to master and put to daily use? No.
This is what gave rise to my questions. How many of those now huffing about pupils so dim they can’t read a clock face could themselves still calculate in pre-decimal currency, use an abacus, or calculate their longitude using a sextant? All these once-essential skills have fallen into disuse not because we have become more stupid, but because our tools have become more sophisticated.
I also wonder if those complaining would be able to throw together a film with fades, dissolves and subtitles. All my students are fluent with such tools, which leave many of their parents looking rather dull in comparison.
Outrage at the apparent stupidity of millennials and the generations following them has become a trope for certain sections of the press, one that is crass and offensive. As GCSE season arrives I can’t help but think that this storm over clock faces is an early shot in the annual “exams are getting easier” vein.
We have been here before. Indignation over such technological change is a generational shibboleth, a means of testing membership of the “proper” world as certain privileged adults have labelled it.
Rather than perpetuating a tired struggle about which technologies signify this proper intelligence in those coming after us, what we should celebrate instead is the extraordinary proficiency that our young people are developing with suites of tools so sophisticated they make telling the time seem like child’s play.
• Kester Brewin is a maths teacher based in south-east London
