Teaching Time

I can’t remember the last time I had such a complete epic fail as my past week of teaching Grade 5 Maths. It is quite possible that not one learner obtained any new knowledge this entire week. I might was well have tried to teach them how to find the derivative. What daunting topic was I actually trying to teach? Time. Writing down an am or pm time that was said verbally (like I said twenty past 4 in the afternoon). Writing down an am or pm time that they saw on a clock face. Writing down an am or pm time that they saw on a digital 24-clock. Didn’t think it would be that difficult – review really. Totally wrong.

When they heard a time said aloud verbally, they were completely confused as to which number was the minutes and which was the hour. The words “past” and “to” (as in quarter to three or half past eleven) were simply interchangeable and did not seem to mean different things, or really they didn’t seem to mean anything at all. While looking at a clock face they were unable to distinguish between the hour and the minute hand. And when faced with a digital time, they would simply write in again and then randomly put an am or pm (or both) after the time. And in the rare case that none of above offered a challenge, they often wrote something like 2:8pm, forgetting that the minutes always needed two digits. Worst of all, my real goal for the week was to have them learn how to calculate the amount of time that had passed between two given times and to determine the ending time of an event given the start time and the amount of time that would pass until the end. It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was a zero percent chance we would get to that at any point.

So why such an uphill battle? I’m sure that there’s a different reason for every learner, but I can’t help but think that a big part of it is the relative importance (or lack of importance) of time in general in Zulu culture. Some of the problems are similar to those faced in America. Very few people wear watches any more, so the number of times most of the kids have seen a clock face is extremely limited. But these are not kids with cell phones. Most likely there is a cell phone for use by the family, often to send and receive text messages, but it is not checked regularly for the time of day. So it is easily possible that the learners could go for days without ever seeing the time in any fashion. And why should they? Time is of no consequence here. If it is said that an event will begin at 11am, you are lucky if anyone arrives by 1pm. What time does the next taxi leave for Durban? When it fills up with people. When does my class start? When the teacher teaching the class before me is finished. These are the realities of the culture, so time becomes just another one of those maths concepts that beg children to ask “When am I ever going to use this?” I’m not going to lie; it’s frustrating.

And so now the task has doubled – or maybe quadrupled. I must find a way to make time seem important to kids that don’t have access to television, so TV program schedules don’t offer much interest and to kids that aren’t likely to be headed to the airport anytime soon to catch a plane and to kids that cook by taste and sight rather than recognizing how long something has been boiling. (I once asked my host sister how long it took to boil a butternut and she said until it is soft to the touch. When I asked again about how long that usually takes, she simply said she had no idea, she never thought to figure that out as it is just even enough to check every once in a while to see if it is done.) And I must go back to the teaching schedule and find the time to re-teach this topic. This is one of those moments when a time machine would really come in handy.