When the new school year starts, take stock of how many of your students are wearing watches. If your students are anything like mine, no more than three or four of them will sport watches on their wrists. A while back, an executive I met from a major watch company told me point-blank that watch companies know this, and are desperately scrambling to try to resuscitate the watch — jazz it up, or invent a smart, sassy, and irresistibly alluring advertising campaign that gets young people back onto the watch track.

For most of our students, cell phones have replaced watches. But more to the point, whether they use watches or cell phones, most of our students, most of the time, read time digitally.

“Reading time” is either a spatial or a numerical activity (in the case of the analog clock, both are required; in the case of the digital clock, all one needs is numbers). Although grammar schools still teach kids how to read analog clocks, children grow up surrounded by digital time-telling instruments (the TV, stove, microwave, etc.). There are very few occasions when they have to rely on being able to read an analog clock. It doesn’t take an oracle to see that the immediate future lies with the digital clock, and that in the not too distant future, the analog clock will probably all but disappear. Only a few (mostly specialists) will continue to want a watch with a face and hands.

The analog clock carries certain advantages over the digital clock. First, once learned — once turned into an easy habit — reading and comprehending the meaning of the hands occurs almost immediately. Pilots, for example, like clocks with hands on faces. (When a hand moves suddenly to the left, it means, “Uh oh, the plane is going down.”) Second, reading an analog clock creates a spatial plan of time in the mind. If the hands say it’s 8 o’clock, and it’s the morning, you can “feel” — holistically — how much longer you have until noon. Third, analog time is more fluid and uncertain. Telling time becomes an activity of estimating, rather than locating. Finally, analog clocks permit and even encourage the subjective experience of time. (Of course, to experience time in a completely subjective way, we’d need to destroy all forms of clocks.)

On the other hand, there are clearly some advantages to digital clocks. First, time isn’t nearly so difficult for a child to learn how to read as it is on an analog clock. Second, digital time is specific, and is more apt to be accurate. Third, digital clocks compel the brain to practice arithmetic — if it’s 9:12 and you have to meet someone at 10:30, you have to do some mental subtraction, and perhaps even try the (gasp) advanced arithmetic of rounding off numbers. Finally, since reading time on a digital clock consists of simply reading numbers, and since we live in a digital age anyway, digital clocks are a great, unifying, democratizing force. If everyone goes digital, we’ll have a shared digital language.

If you buy my last paragraph, clearly you’ve never encountered “student time,” which is a direct consequence of the digital clock. “Student time” is a way of telling time where arriving late to class is considered no big deal, appointments are never meant to be for a fixed time, hesitation in reading an analog clock is the norm, and the words, “It’s a quarter to twelve,” are replaced with, “11:43.”

Nor have you ever taken a good, long look at the beauty in the face of an analog watch.