Paper Dish Clocks

D.’s working on a lesson plan for her second graders on Monday. She’s charged with teaching them to tell time using analog face-clocks, old-style tickers, long hand and short. Which one signifies minutes again? Talking over the lesson with her, I was having fun with the idea that we drill time systems quite early in life. Alphabetic literacy is only few months–in developmental terms, curricular terms–ahead of chronological literacy. And in an ever-busy age, maybe it’s chronological literacy that puts the squeeze on the glee of childhood. What the hell am I talking about?

Coincidentally, I just received an email from G. at Time Lapse Productions. No kidding. The message title: HI. I’ve been getting a lot of those lately. I don’t want to name names or point fingers, but I have a hunch that our IT folks are fertilizing the WWW with stuff to feed the worm, since half of my daily email intake at work (about twenty message each day) has been wormy. They’re pleasant, though. Like this note from G., the message title is friendly. It’s the body of the note that is impersonal: The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment. Yes indeed, a title can do a lot to draw a reader into a document.

D.’s lesson. She’s concerned with the rigid points of the curriculum. Students must refer to 30-minutes after the hour as “half past.” That’s the language on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) tests. So, when we’re talking about the time lesson, D. explained how they only had one day for each hand, one day for fifteen-minute units, one day for half-hour units, one day for five-minute units. Meanwhile, I’m looking at my digital Timex (but still offering up alert, focused attention), wondering *how long until this analog arrangement gets dumped by its own invention?* *how long until there won’t be time to teach time-telling, provided the regimen and pace gain steam in perpetuity?*

She has a fine lesson complete with foldable paper plate clock faces. The second graders won’t need to know about the Benedictine monks or King Charles V who started using the bell-chimes as social organizers in Paris in 1370 (re-reading Technopoly, so I’m not digging too awfully deep for this information). None of the antecedents to formal time structures will be on the MAP tests. I just hope for D.’s sake they pick up the language of time. It’d be a shame for them to call “half past nine” by the name of “nine-thirty” or, worse yet, “going on ten.” Suppose they’ll learn to break form later on.

Claro! (2.7.04) I said I was paying full, complete, undivided attention. Not so. D. read this entry. It wasn’t the MAP test at all. “Half past” is district-speak for thirty minutes after.