Teenager can’t tell the time

[KindBeaker]

Hi. My 14 year old son still can’t tell the time properly. He knows what time he has to be leave for school but only because he has memorised where the hands should be on the clock!

He can’t get his head around digital times at all and can’t make the link between digital and analogue so he wouldn’t know that 4.15 is the same as quarter past 4.

He’s reasonably intelligent. Is getting good grades in his school reports including Maths.

I’ve tried talking about it and shoehorning times into conversations but he just gets annoyed with it! I think he gets frustrated himself that he doesn’t get it.

Anyone else experienced this and can give some tips??!!

Can you get a clock where he can move the hands himself? That might help.

I used to use the thought of a pizza or cake for the quarter and half past

Has he been assessed for dyslexia? This can be a telltale sign.

What happened when he was younger and you were teaching him? Did his primary school never have any suggestions?

This!
I have 3 Dyslexic dc. All 3 struggle with time.

One got a 9 in English but still can't tell the time.

DD is like this and has dyslexia. She manages to be where needed using digital and we ended up just sticking to that as it was a work around and life too short.

She’s a competent reader but not when it comes to reading aloud and can’t get the months of the year in the right order or equate them to numbers.

There are some really good tutorials on YouTube that can help with this. They teach a step at a time to find the hour, then find the minutes.
also kids these days don’t seem to say quarter to or 10-to it’s “three forty five” “one-thirty” or “nine fifty” etc.
My dyslexic DC found this hard but did get it from the explanation on the video.
Once he understood I began to use “quarter to” type language and we’d convert them together but this was a later task, he needed to properly master the hour and minutes first

Have a look into dyscalculia. My niece looks likely to have this and can't tell the time, she got good grades in maths and science but really struggles with handling and manipulating numbers. She is a bright girl and had been relying on memory and her own work around until she got to her GCSE years and the drain on her brain made it really difficult and her problems with numbers and all that became more obvious. She got some extra support and came away with straight 7-9s.

I went to college with a guy who couldn’t tell the time- too of our class in biochemistry but had a digital watch in case there was a clock with hands in exam hall! I know it’s no help but it just seemed to be a hurdle he never got over

Lots of teens are like this, loads particularly with analogue clocks.

more unusual to have problems with digital clocks though.

My autistic 11yr old can’t either but knows the 24hr clock in & out! Give her any 24hr time such as 18:22 and she’ll decipher it correctly every time.
I could’ve tried harder to teach her the analogue clock perhaps? She also cannot tie her own shoe laces and just this last month has finally figured out how to tie her hair up - which are both things I have tried extensively to teach her.
Very interested to hear suggestions of dyslexia as I suspected that for my DD in Reception but her teacher said “Nahhhh she’s not” and this teacher was also my Reception teacher in 88’ so I trust her experience. Hmmm

I never got the grasp of analogue time at school. It seemed that whenever 90% of the class had understood something, we moved on to the next topic, and I was in the 10% that didn't understand most things when it came to maths. I suspect that I have undiagnosed dyscalculia, but the anxiety-inducing question of, "What time is it?" is even worse! I find digital time easier, and it's much more common now with phones, FitBits, laptops/iPads and so on... but it took time to get used to it, e.g. alarm clocks for college.

When having to teach children how to tell the time, I'd tell them to think about it like a pizza or a cake, cutting it into half for 'half-past', quarters for 'to' and 'past', enough chunks for five-minute intervals, etc.