My 14 month-old daughter, Olive, is fascinated by clocks and loves to hold them (in the case of my alarm clock or watch) or otherwise point them out. On a recent outing to Denny’s, for example, she yelled “CLOCK!” across the dining room, at the top of her tiny lungs, to describe a timepiece barely noticed by mom and dad.
I commented recently to a colleague who teaches Spanish, “Wow, I need to get one of those foam play clocks you use to teach time to your first year students. Olive would love that.” And it looks like, if I did get one, she might be at the top of her class 15 years from now. Let me explain:
My own classroom clock, which I’d had for the past four years, was broken. It was obviously very cheaply made to begin with, as the numbers were just printed on an inserted piece of cardboard, which had begun to warp over time from classroom humidity. Additionally, some student had written “POOP” across the plastic face two or three years ago. I had cleaned the plastic with soap and water, but at the right angle, “POOP” was always visible. The poor clock finally gave up the ghost this August; when I returned to work from summer vacation, I noticed it was no longer keeping time. I changed the batteries – twice – but to no avail. In the first couple of days of class, my students would comment on it: “What time are we out of here? 11:04 ? Why does the clock say 5:17 ?” and so I turned it around (as kind of a placeholder), and vowed to buy a new clock over the next weekend.
Olive helped me to pick out a new clock from an entire row of them at the store – “Clock! Clock! CLOCK!” It was pristine and shiny and I brought it, with a pack of AA batteries, to school on Monday. Only then did I realize that the clock was actually screwed into the cardboard packaging. As the mother of a toddler, it took me the better part of three weeks to find the time to put a screwdriver into my school bag. As someone who teaches six classes a day, and has only 49 minutes of prep time, it took me another two days to actually unscrew and assemble the clock.
“Finally,” I said to my fourth period class that day, “there is a new clock! Everyone can put their cell phones away, as you can now look to the clock for the time.”
“But that’s hard,” came a chorus of voices. Of course. The same Spanish-teaching colleague has mentioned several times how difficult it is to teach time in her class, mainly because students don’t know how to tell time in English either. Many students in 4th, most trying to waste time, some truly ignorant, asked about the different sized hands, and “what the little lines are for.” Telling Time 101 soon gave way to a more fitting discussion for a high school English class: diction and syntax. Why do teachers say “weird” things like, “we’ll work on this project until a quarter after twelve,” or “class is out at ten ‘til.” Who talks like that? What does that even mean?! After my explanation, one student argued that “quarter after” still didn’t make sense, because a quarter is 25, not 15.
And so, if you see me reading with Olive sometime, and you hear me paraphrasing “Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one-fifteen, the mouse ran around until a quarter to two ,” now you’ll know why.
