Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

As a primary teacher in the United States, I was sometimes caught off guard by students' ideas about time. Some 10-year-olds, I noticed, still could not read a clock or calculate the time between recess and lunch, and some thought that televisions hadn't been invented when I was young. Today, even my university students can surprise me, such as when one prospective teacher aimed to have children interview someone who was alive at the time of slavery...