The clock in my classroom for this term appears to be set five minutes slow. Which is an improvement over the one in the hall that's ten minutes slow, but kind of plays hell with starting and ending class on time. It is, however, a great excuse for a poll:
Combine the odd clock settings with our daft class schedule (to make our ten-week terms nominally equivalent to standard semester classes, we teach in 65-minute blocks instead of the more typical 50-minute blocks. This means that classes start and end at odd times, which I've never entirely gotten used to.), and it's looking like a disorienting term...
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Official NIST time, as opposed to Naval Observatory time? Surely you jest.
You bring back memories of the 10 week term, 65 minute classes of my undergrad days. Nothing prepares you for class like sprinting through the snow because no two clocks on campus are set the same.
It's annoying when you teach in a room with a clock that's fast. You can't start early, because then students who are really on time walk in "late", but you students get restless when you use the full class period (ok, they'd get restless even if the clock was righ5t, but you get the point).
Reminds me of something...
When I was at Union I dated a girl who had a half-dozen or so clocks in her room, all set to different times. She had no idea what time it was when she was in her room, but they did have a purpose. One clock told her the time it would be in the campus center when she got there, one told her what time it would be in the math department when she got there, etc. I'm not sure if she factored in the clocks being off at her destinations, but it wouldn't surprise me.
*your students get restless (sounds a little less "get off my lawn")
@Tom: Chad used to work at NIST, so of course his institutional biases would be in that direction. And please don't call our host Shirley.
Having all the clocks showing the same time would be a preferable scheme regardless of what they were set to (preferably at least *close* to local time, for the convenience of those who don't deal with arithmetic -- or even math -- in their daily academic work). There have been attempts to do this for decades, but they were based on mechanical designs that, in the long run, were even less reliable.
I would expect, in the age where students expect near-ubiquitous wireless Internet access, that the cost of a reliable solution would be dirt-cheap. I just made a quick Internet search, though, and I don't see much that really fills that niche with networking technology. There are radio-synchronized clocks for that market, and GPS technology as well, but I've had problems with radio reception on both of those -- particularly in, ahem, university laboratories.
I may just be out of date, because I have only seen the insides of a couple of post-secondary school campuses recently, and they're both state schools with the predictable "vintage" physical facilities. I hope folks here can tell me that I am, in fact, just out of touch.
Hang them all on the same wall and let Huygens sort it out
I've used a backwards clock for some years now. It's always good to make students use their brains a little.
I have five clocks that get their time from WWVB at Fort Collins, Colorado, and at work I like knowing when it is, with all of us agreeing on when 'now' is. Keeping the same time allows tight coordination.
Fifty years ago, being within five minutes was close enough. An in-house meeting scheduled for 9:00 might have people coming in minutes late or early. 9:10 was the threshold for 'late'.
Being a little late to work was not a big deal for salaried people. Hourly workers set their watches to the company's timeclock, and then, at home again, set their house clocks to their watches. If the company reset the master clock, everything would be messed up, so the usual practice, if the master clock ran a little fast or slow, was to let it be wrong.
I once taught a relatively large lecture course where the clock behind me that the students could see was 5 minutes fast and the clock at the back of the hall that I could see was a few minutes slow--class dynamics were a little odd until I figured this out. Maybe we need a non-linear time progression for classroom clocks?