Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Stubborn kid gets in her own way

DD6 had been completely failing to learn to tell time. I thought maybe it had to do with her slightly wacky spatial skills. Yesterday I repeated for the eleventy-hundredth time, "Look at the short hand first. The short hand tells the hour. The long hand tells the minutes."

This time something new happened. She looked me straight in the eye and said "Really?" And the look on her face said "That's the stupidest system ever." (Obviously, the long hand should stand for the longer amount of time.) Then she said skeptically, "Is that true for ALL clocks?" Yes. All of them.

The kid mastered the basics of telling time within the next few minutes. It had nothing to do with the spatial relationships confusing her. No, she had merely spent two years refusing to believe me that the short hand tells the hour.

Sheesh. It's like, you can get a donkey to cooperate, you just have whack it between the eyes with a 2-by-4 first to get its attention.

LOL, MegMeg. And sympathies...

I wonder if that is ds7's problem too. He really doesn't seem to believe me.

And she is right it is silly.

I remember thinking it was silly too and then I either realized or had it pointed out to me that the minutes are smaller increments, with more precision required, so you want that hand right out touching the minute marks, whereas the hours you can easily tell which hour the short hand is pointing to even with the gap.

Well ... huh! DS6.5 also resisted learning to tell time from a clock for a long time. He really seemed annoyed that not all clocks are digital.

He's finally got it now... but I wonder if it was something similar holding him back.

Congrats to you, and congrats to your child for her learning to tell time on an analog clock/watch!
Yes, I've heard other children express that logic over the years, seems intuitive, doesn't it? It often helps to know what kids are thinking. Here are some parental explanations to help kids remember which pointer is which:
- the short hand only needs to point in the general direction of an hour, a minute hand must reach all the way to the minute markers to be precise.
- the word "hour" is short like the hour hand, the word "minute" is longer like the minute hand.

This old post and this article vary a bit in sharing that learning to tell time on an analog clock is a developmental milestone for ages 5-8, and something a child can typically do after kindergarten.

My older in first grade or so got time....digital first, elapsed time, time/distance/traffic/speed of car, miles per hour, miles per minute, analog....time he got! It actually was a tell about his intelligence.

Money on the other hand was just Chinese to him....he could count by ones, fives, tens, twenty five. He could add and subtract money amounts....but beyond that applying the value to the coins and how many pennies in a dime....nope....he just looked at me in utter confusion (I was homeschooling).

What fascinates me is the way she will simply not hear what I'm saying, because she's already made up her mind that it's some other way.

She does this with reading too. She gets it into her head what the next word should be, and she stares at the letters trying to make them be what she thinks the word HAS to be, simply disbelieving the evidence of her own eyes.

Sometimes asking a question may help a kid hear what's being conveyed, it seems to process through a different part of the brain?

The upside of this may be a strong predictive ability, so personally I would praise her for that, saying something along the lines of, "That would be a great idea." Possibly even discuss other things the text could say. Then go on to discussing what the text does say.

At this point I will confess I originally read the subject line as "Stubborn kid gets her own way" (not "Stubborn kid gets in her own way").

Oh yeah, she's got that in spades. It's just, it might serve her well, every once in a while, to let her brain shut up and let someone else tell her what's what!