Watches were pretty ubiquitous before the smart phone was popularized. Though, digital watches were common since the '80s, so I'm not sure how much that really figures in. There is some truth, though, in needing to regularly do it to keep the skill.

I don’t understand how you could possibly classify looking at a clock as lazy.

Disagree - it rarely matters to me if it's 13:24:56 or 13:25:05, but I do find the instant and intuitive gauging of time deltas super useful (as in, how long it's going to be to the full hour / to quarter past / ... ). Not saying you can't get that info from a digital clock as well, of course you can; but the physicality of analog clocks lends a good bit of intuition to this, I feel.

Congratulations! ⭐

FWIW, I went to school in mid-2000. My sibling even later. They still taught it back then, and at least here, I am pretty sure they still do. (And why would they not, after all...)

and are wearing Crocs everywhere they go.

Oooh, that's harsh.

Not exactly responding to you, but wanted to post somewhere where people would see it (hopefully)

We are not removing clocks or the standards, but it is not as important as many other standards in my grade level and 3rd grade. As a joke, I am going to bring a kid to our intervention team who can't tell time as his only academic issue. We will all get a good laugh out of it.

Every 2nd/3rd grade teacher I've worked with believes their students can tell time by the end of the year. This being said, regression is a well known phenomenon in education over breaks, but this is regression is due to analog clocks disappearing in society I assume and devastating to a newly acquired skill. Here are the 2nd grade standards, I would say this and counting money have become completely unsupported at home in my Title 1 school. Most teachers I have ever met care about kids and want them to learn, but there is only so much to do. They spend a lot more time out of school in their childhood than other places. Do the math!

2.OA.A Adding/Subtracting within 100 word problem and representations

2.OA.B Memorizing add/sub facts to 20

2.OA.C Equal groups (building blocks for multiplication)

2.NBT.A Place value (broken into 4 substandards, its kind of really fucking important)

2.NBT.B Place value (broken into 4 more substandards, its kind of really fucking important)

2.MD.A Measure and estimate in metric and standard (broken into 4 substandards, it is kind of really fucking important)

2.MD.B Addition and Subtraction in relation to length

2.MD.C Time to nearest 5 minutes and money 2.MD.D Interpreting graphs

2.G Shapes and Attributes

Literally noone I know in real life has any problem whatsoever reading analog clocks, no matter the "brain capacity", neuro-typicality, state of drunkenness,... It is an extremely simple "skill".

Because it's not! Glad to help you clear that up.

Same reason you might use 22/7 instead of the exact value of π. If I look at a clock and see it's about ten to 2, it's rare to never that I actually need to know it's 1:53:22.57365785285978520256734567314854372354675466099.

They are actually a helpful way to show passage of time visually, without abstract math knowledge. For example my son has downsydrome, he could read time from analog and understand passage of time and time left on it, but numbers counting up to 60 was abstract.. Like its 47 minutes past 5 how close to the hour is it getting? No clue unless he wrote it out as a math question and did the subtraction. But for him those were meaningless numbers anyway. 15 was no different than 45 for him. But visual cues of quarter past and quarter to made sense for him