RE: Why Children Must Learn Their Times Tables

This might seem unrelated but entertain me for a minute. This morning, I'm making myself some tea, watching some youtube vids of nerdy stuff to start up slowly. A nerd channel I follow (surprise to nobody) has posted a video about installing linux on a watch. I had to click.

The host, the owner of said channel is someone very technical, someone I enjoy watching too, but, I think today I lost so much respect for the guy, I don't know he could win me back.

He sets up the watch, right? All good in the hood as the kids used to say. Then, he finds a feature of watch faces, custom watch faces to be precise. He expresses how he loves the look, that he would use these instead of the numbers being displayed, but he can't tell time on a watch with hands. He says, without shame (that is what is shocking to me) that he can only read digital watches.

This is a grown up in America, mind you, who thought that its perfectly acceptable to be unable to tell time on an analog watch.

I'm sitting there thinking to myself. Who is the idiot here? Am I being an old fart? Is this guy not a functioning adult with a Youtube channel making a living? Do I have a leg to stand on?

So now, I'm divided right in the middle. On the one hand, I feel like the new generations are growing up without proper mental tooling (the soul of your post), but on the other hand, I wonder if it truly matters.

As I wrote that line, I'm already fighting back the notion that its Ok, because no matter how much I want to live and let live, it hurts my brain.