Go metric
Last week, I joined the United States Metric Association and got some cool metric paraphernalia, including a bunch of "GO METRIC" bumperstickers.
I think it's sad that the U.S. has yet to widely adopt the metric system, although there are incremental transitions going on in areas like food and beverage labels. I think children could learn the metric system fully and easily in a single generation (as children in many other countries around the world did, often during the 1970s and 1980s) and start using it naturally on a day-to-day basis. Decimalization would make our measurement process a lot easier, and using SI units would help us talk to the rest of the world.
I learned imperial (or customary) measure in elementary school, and learned metric in junior high and high school science classes. But the science classes didn't try to teach us to estimate or think about everyday objects in metric units -- only to use them in calculations and lab measurement. So my housemate who works with electron devices is quite happy to use metric measure at the nanometer scale, but it doesn't come naturally to him at the meter level. I have the same problem: I worked plenty of high school physics problems where an object gained 1 J of potential energy by being moved 1 m against a conservative field producing 1 N of force, but I never got any specific idea how much 1 J or 1 N were in everyday terms. (If I lost 40 pounds of weight, how many newtons lighter would I be? Calculation says about 178, and that would require losing about 18 kg on Earth, but neither of these things is obvious to me as a human-scale metric weight-loss program!)
One of the points made by metric educators is that kids (and adults) shouldn't try to convert conventional units to metric all the time. That's annoying and creates an impression that metric is really hard (because every single time you want to use metric, you have to multiple or divide by some possibly hard-to-remember constant!); it leads to an interpretation of the metric system as some kind of weird code superimposed on top of normal everyday measurement. Instead, metric educators advocate learning metric from scratch as something to think in directly -- much as modern language education often favors immersion over translation. So I'm going to make a bit of an effort to do some measurement exercises for kids in the hope of getting more of a native familiarity with human-scale metric measurements.
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