Time to Learn

I remember only flashes of my elementary school attendance.  It happened a long time ago and I was a child, give me a break.

The things I do remember are enough to show that I didn’t fit in.  My brain worked differently than others’.  I couldn’t seem to conform.  It always frustrated me.  And, I now realize, it had to have frustrated my teachers as well.

One particular instance was in the second grade.  We were doing a unit on time telling.  The first obstacle I encountered was my naming conventions.  They didn’t match what everyone else took for granted.  I liked my way and didn’t see why I had to change.

I don’t know why I came up with it, or when, but by the time I got to school it was fixed in my mind.  The fastest moving hand on the clock was the minute hand.  It was only logical because that is how long it took to complete one full revolution.  The next hand took one hour to make a full revolution, obviously the hour hand.  I ran into a problem with the slowest hand.  I called it the day hand even though it took two revolutions to complete a technical 24-hour day.  No bother, it was the day hand.  I justified that it was one rotation for day and one for night. 

It took me a long time to realize that it made sense that each hand’s name had to do with the unit of current time it was measuring.  You see, I just thought differently.

One assignment I remember was a worksheet.  There were various clock diagrams with only the hour hand showing.  Based on its location we had to tell what time it was.  I got every problem wrong on the test because instead of rounding to the top of the hour I estimated the minutes too.  You see the hour hand was never directly over a number; it was always between two numbers.  On one problem I estimated the time as 8:22 because the hour hand was just over a third of the way past the eight on its way to the nine. Yes, 8:22.  I estimated the extra two minutes. I suppose I could have rounded to twenty past the hour, but I didn’t. To me it seemed intuitive.  To my teacher it seemed wrong.

I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t eight o’clock (which she was telling me was the right answer) because if it were, the hour hand would be directly over the eight, which it certainly was not.  That didn’t seem to please her and I remained unable to convince her that I was simply being logical.

As it was, she had the power and so she got her way—she was right and I was wrong.

What’s the moral of the story?  There’s probably not one.  Or maybe it’s that if I ever see my teacher again and she asks me what time it is I’m going to round to the nearest hour.  And then I’ll laugh and she won’t know why.  Because I’m sure she has long since forgotten even though I haven’t.