Time Keeps on Slippin'

“You can tell time, can’t you?” asks the late comic Richard Prior as he whoops up on his kids for their indifference to his parental concern. In his poignantly hilarious, if not a little controversial, manner Prior was mocking the contrast between the white, suburban, “Please pass the potatoes”, middle-class plain-ness and the jive-talkin’, jeri-curlin’ minstrelsy of poor urban black folk. As it turns out, many of those white suburban kids of privilege really can’t tell time.

In the public high school where I sometimes substituted, a student had to have a hall pass to go from the classroom to any other location during class period. The passes asked for the student’s name, date, destination, and time. At first, and largely as a matter of expedience, I asked the student the time. To my astonishment I learned that many kids – most of the kids - just could not tell the time. Seriously, I mean they could not look at the clock and TELL me the time. I don’t mean to imply that these kids are simply stupid…that would be an easy out. Yet, even when I made it super easy on them by just asking them to ball-park it, saying “Is it like a little before two o’clock?” or “Is it ABOUT ten thirty?” I was still met with blank looks. How could this be? Are these kids that inept? That lazy? I was prepared to concede and just say yes but then I got to thinking about it.

Since when do kids really need to know what time it is? Their moms wake them up in the morning. The ubiquitous school bell (not really a bell anymore but more of a synthesized clanging one might associate with a diving submarine) keeps them moving throughout the school day with nary a twist of the neck to check out the also ubiquitous clock. In fact, the clocks were regarded more with bemused curiosity, like an Aztec trinket or a shark’s tooth, than as a relevant tool of good order and discipline. One day, in response to my befuddlement at three different showings on three different clocks all within ten feet of each other, a math teacher explained to me that she just “listens for the bell!”

Most school-age kids don’t have jobs and so, consequently, have little need to be “on time” for it. Even favorite TV shows that parents remember as being on such and such day at such and such time (remember “Hawaii Five-O” at 10pm EST Wednesdays?) no longer require time-keeping. Kids can download and watch their shows on their PCs, iPods, TiVos or any of a dozen other such gizmos. Kids DON’T need to know what time it is!

Even as adults, the need for good time-telling skills is on the wane. Once heavily scheduled, parents and worker bees are doing more of their errands and tasks on line or over the phone, or more and more, not at all! Now it seems less and less important to be anywhere on time since nobody seems to know what time it is anyway. During the time I lived in Spain I marveled at how anything was ever accomplished in that country given the Spaniard’s less than punctilious devotion to the clock. But at least I knew the reason for their ways; sun-soaked afternoons, warm breezes, good cheap red wine…they genuinely had nothing to do and no where to go and genuinely had no need for time-keeping.

Americans don’t “pass the potatoes” anymore because they don’t sit down together at the dinner table anymore thus rendering dinner “time” irrelevant. I can’t help feeling a little sad and disappointed that a skill as rudimentary as telling time could fall into such neglect.