[j_w]

The comments about analog clock reading being not a worthwhile skill are telling, but not in a good way.

Analog clocks are still very prevalent today. People buy smartwatches, but plenty of people also buy analog watches. Some people even display an analog clock on their smart watch.

Analog clock reading is a completely valid educational tool as well. It takes some basic spatial reasoning. Division, approximation, rounding, some beginnings of the ideas useful later in trig.

In 10+ years will people on Hackernews be arguing about how reading is useless because of progression text to speech and speech to text makes it effectively a useless endeavor?

[doom2]

I'm also very confused by the almost complete dismissal of intellectual curiosity in this thread. People learn things they don't _need_ to learn all the time and post about it here without being met with a "I don't need to learn that so why would anyone learn that" attitude. It's baffling.

[georgefrowny]

It's very strange, especially on Hacker News.

What's stranger to me, assuming these kids are in classrooms with analogue clocks, is that they aren't constantly subdividing the clock face in every more complex mental schemes in boring lessons. "Just 2 more minutes, and then we'll be exactly 5/8 of the way through the second half of the lesson."

Maybe I am the weird one here.