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This monthly section of the Problem Solvers department showcases students' in-depth thinking and discusses the classroom results of using problems presented in previous issues of Teaching Children Mathematics. The December 2014/January 2015 problem offer students an opportunity to investigate the structure, components, and organization of an analog clock. The problem focuses on student understanding of minutes and hours, the relationships between them, and how they are represented on a clock.

Although our increasingly digital world replaces most of our analog tools, the analog clock remains useful. Students determine the passage of elapsed time using images from pocket watch faces that have only hour hands. Each month, this section of the Problem Solvers department features a new challenge for students. Readers are encouraged to submit problems to be considered for future columns.

This article examines references to mechanical watches in the literature of the long eighteenth century. In particular, it is shown that literary watches never acquired a stable set of symbolical associations during this period. Rather than being strongly polysemous, though, they frequently united diametrically opposed meanings, and therefore destabilized the arguments in which they were embedded as often as they reinforced them. This article examines this curious and complicated aspect of their literary significance from a range of different perspectives. Specifically, references to watches are explored in relation to public and private spaces, to ostentatious display and meditative isolation, and to mechanical reliability and wayward inexactness. The discussion culminates with an assessment of the many convoluted gender-specific and sex-based implications that watches acquired.

Sauter argues that modern time discipline emerged during the 18th century with the rise of a more public and publicly discussed understanding of time. Taking 18th- and early-19th-century Berlin as a case study, Sauter claims that before 1800, people disciplined clocks, but after 1800, clocks disciplined people.

The most compelling portrayal of timekeeping technology in an English poem of the early seventeenth century is a long and complicated passage from John Donne's 1614 poem “Obsequyes vpon the Lord Harrington the last that dyed.” In this passage, Donne deploys clock and sundial images to critique the values of the religio‐political faction with which the deceased Lord Harington was associated, a group of courtiers and scholars strongly invested in the development of new technologies. Comparing human beings to timepieces in a conceit that plays upon the traditional iconography of Temperance, Donne challenges technological progressivism, promoting in its place a skeptical chronometry of virtue. Donne's conceit poses interpretive challenges that force readers to think analytically and critically about how technology—and in particular the technology of time‐measurement—is related to human goodness and well‐being. [T. M. D.]

The author argues that the Restoration fop queers time rather than gender, through a consideration of his \"fashionable lateness.\" If the fop's queerness is located in his or her engagement with time, then the fop can speak to important cultural issues beyond gender alone, including but not limited to a variety of temporally dictated constructs such as social participation, evolving economic systems, family obligations, and the interplay between work and leisure. To be fashionably late is to arrive notably after an agreed upon time, but to do so with such éclat that the social faux pas is forgiven, even celebrated. Fashionable lateness is a habitual mode of social entrance. By arriving late, the fop purchases social exception, excusing the tardy individual from obligations to which his prompt acquaintances are held. The Restoration fop's fashionable lateness is an aggressive performance of nonchalance that allows an individual to manipulate the very social contracts otherwise central to Restoration and early eighteenth-century culture.

This essay, about pocket watches and time consciousness in the nineteenth‐century United States, suggests that the increasing volume of pocket watches in circulation throughout the United States after the 1830s prodded a wide cross section of Americans into more than just simple awareness of mechanical time. The evidence, some of which is drawn from accounts relaying details about repairs to watches, shows that watches augmented, rather than replaced, already complex temporal sensibilities. The article includes estimates about the incidence of watch ownership, the kinds of watches Americans owned, and the sorts of repairs watches most commonly required.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has done more than anyone since Czeslaw Milosz to introduce English-language readers to the greatest modern Slavic poets. InOranges and Snow, Simic continues this work with his translations of one of today's finest Serbian poets, Milan Djordjevic. An encounter between two poets and two languages, this bilingual edition--the first selection of Djordjevic's work to appear in English--features Simic's translations and the Serbian originals on facing pages. Simic, a native Serbian speaker, has selected some forty-five of Djordjevic's best poems and provides an introduction in which he discusses the poet's work, as well as the challenges of translation. Djordjevic, who was born in Belgrade in 1954, is a poet who gives equal weight to imagination and reality. This book ranges across his entire career to date. His earliest poems can deal with something as commonplace as a bulb of garlic, a potato, or an overcoat fallen on the floor. Later poems, often dreamlike and surreal, recount his travels in Germany, France, and England. His recent poems are more autobiographical and realistic and reflect a personal tragedy. Confined to his house after being hit and nearly killed by a car while crossing a Belgrade street in 2007, the poet writes of his humble surroundings, the cats that come to his door, the birds he sees through his window, and the copies of one of his own books that he once burnt to keep warm. Whatever their subject, Djordjevic's poems are beautiful, original, and always lyrical.

\"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'\"--The Poetry Lesson