New Insights and Their Implications

While I was reading chapter 20 I noticed a section about measuring time and found myself really interested. During my internship this semester for SPED I have been watching first hand how teachers teach students to read a clock. There are many different ways to do it and it made me think about how I was taught to tell time or read a clock. It is a difficult skill especially for students who do not think it is necessary with digital clocks all over. Our book made a good point about some common confusions students have. Students are taught one hand at a time and then are expected to put them together which is more confusing to them than just learning both together in the first place. If students learn about exact hours or hour and half they will not be able to tell any other time. I noticed in the classroom last week that one student was supposed to look at multiple clocks and write down what time it was and she did fine when it was exact hours or half past an hour but when it came down to counting minutes in between she was completely confused. I think that the book gives a good alternative to teaching clock reading which begins with a one-handed clock and then moves onto discussion about what happens to the big hand has the little hand goes from one hour to the next. Students need to predict where the minute hand should be if the hour hand is in a specific location. The book also suggests teaching time in 5-minute intervals. This is a skill that I would not have expected in my math book but I think that I it gave a lot of good information and I know now from experience that this is a tough skill for students and different methods of instruction are necessary.