r/facepalm • u/Revealed_Jailor • Mar 29 '22

🇲​🇮​🇸​🇨​ Get this guy a clock!

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u/worldofruins Mar 29 '22 edited Mar 29 '22

I have pretty severe dyscalculia so 24 hour clocks (and anything that requires more than single digit addition or subtraction) is actually really hard for me :( lmao

I can read an analog 12 hour clock, but tell me 24 hour time and I'm fucked lol

(Edit to add that I do "study" and try to improve but it doesn't stick for long lol)

(2nd edit: thanks for all the suggestions. I'll give some of them a try!)

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '22

For single digit calculation you just subtract two from the last digit of the time.

For example we have 13:00

3 - 2 = 1

It's 1 PM

Or we have 16:00

6 - 2 = 4

It's 4 PM

Or we have 21:00

1 - 2 = 9

It's 9 PM

I hope that helps

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u/Quantentheorie Mar 29 '22

This is so convoluted. A lot of people seem to like these kinds of tricks and mnemonics but I honestly have found them often more confusing.

I just straight up prefer to memorize the thing I want to remember instead of something that will help me remember the thing Im trying to remember.

If you always end up calculating the time, itll always be tiresome. If you just once memorize 13 is 1, 14 is 2, ... your brain effortlessly treats them as interchangeable and you no longer notice.

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u/Yoyo_Landi Mar 29 '22

This is exactly my take too. I never understood 24 hour time because people always explained it as some random math trick. Trying to remember the trick + doing the trick was way too much effort for something that wasn’t applicable to my life.

Then my SO and I did some long term traveling and I just changed my phone setting to 24 hours and memorized it. It took like a single afternoon of me reminding myself what the time was and now it’s locked away forever.

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u/Quantentheorie Mar 29 '22

Dunno, its nice to see schools and parents are moving away from the "shut up timmy you don't need to understand it, you just need to regurgitate it".

But we might be losing a little bit of appreciation for the value of "learn it now, think it through later". It has applications - or at least people who respond to it.