If you have ever had the experience of teaching kids who had previously only known how to read a digital clock how to identify the time on a clock whose face has numbers and hands, you are no doubt aware of what a strange experience it can be. While the subtleties of the clock may be lost to an adult who has been telling time on such devices for a very long time, these subtleties are extremely noticeable to a child who has only just started to work on doing so. However, the challenge of time is not so much about reading the clock as it is about working within the confines of clock time.
By nature, human beings are on a type of time which goes by events. When the events line up, the people involved in them go on to the next thing on their agenda, without any particular regard to what time the clock says it is. Consider the notion of meals and meetings. For people in some parts of the world, to show up for a three o’clock meeting at three thirty is considered to be on time. Naturally, in most civilizations that simply will not do, but you are fighting against human nature when you attempt to shift children away from event based time.
After all, most of the impulses that a human being goes by (such as fatigue, hunger and the urge to be active) do not follow a time schedule, but a feeling schedule. While feelings do tend to become habits across a day, they are never truly aligned to the time on the clock, and expecting them to work that way is delusional. But we try nonetheless.