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.
