A Case study of Clock & Time interpretation

Often we look at things for granted. Just that it has been taught to us in a certain way, does not mean that it has to be right. But we don’t question after a certain age and we lose the ability to think critically and sometimes logically in some given situations that could be life saving.

Just have a look at this Year 1 (Standard 1) problem asked in school. It is represented graphically and there are 2 choices in which 1 is correct and the other is wrong.

Now, the interesting thing is not about how this is close to conditioned in daily life. But it will also force a small aged individual to sometimes question, whether it could be right the other way round as well!

Just to put it more accurately, what if this is 10 minutes past 12 O’ Clock ? Since, it is possible that the longer handle denotes hour since its slower and takes longer to travel! And the smaller minutes could be denoted with a smaller handle since it has smaller separations and it should move faster.

So, the way I am presenting those thinking possibilities in the mind is that the pupil will not be seeing an actual physical watch in this examination and will not be able to perceive which handle is running slow or fast to get a hint around which one is hour handle and which one is the minute. Hence answer is completely based on previous learning or present interpretation.

To think as an adult, this is quite interesting indeed! What if we change things around and get to fix one of the clocks in our home/office to function differently!? What if the hour handle is the bigger handle and moves slower than the minute handle? Thus, making very sure that it is 2 O’ Clock or 5 O’ Clock and in spoken terms no one’s really that obsessed about accurate description of minutes.

To think even in finer detail, let the hour handle be bigger as we are thinking here and let the minute handle be as big as the hour one. But the minute handle can be a thinner handle.

To take it even more interesting, the minute handle can be portrayed with a different colour. Much less prominent than the hour handle. Things could change dramatically, isn’t it?

The biggest argument of existing design will be that the people who designed the watches could have thought that the hour handle should be smaller in size as it does not need a lot of attention as it moves slowly and its the minutes and seconds that are more precise and important to determine how accurate we tell or perceive time.

Everyone has to defy the thought process in which that individual has been thinking all their lives. Don’t let the environment or the culture or the school condition your brain! That’s when something drastically different happens. That’s when we question the things that already exist and start thinking about change. That’s when innovation happens!