By continuing to both teach and encourage the teaching of customary measurements we are holding our children back significantly in comparison to the rest of the world. While our kids struggle to memorize things like how many inches are in a yard, feet in a mile or fluid ounces in a cup, the rest of the world just teaches the gram, the meter and the liter and the common prefixes. They can teach in a few days the concepts that are spread over several years in these standards. Once we get to more advanced things, the advantages of the metric system shine (for example, it's easy to calculate the mass of water in an area 1 mm x 1 mm x 10 cm as 0.1 cm^3 is 0.1 x 1 g = 0.1 g; it's a whole different level of problem to teach 1/32 in x 1/32 in x 1/3 ft). Not only does it take a lot longer to teach such things, but they have to be taught later so we lose the foundational aspect of some very important measuring tools and concepts that are useful in daily life. There are several research papers on the difficulties of teaching customary measurements and this is just compounded by things like teaching our children to convert between the accumulation of customary measurements and the metric system. Associated issues such as teachers telling students that they'll never need metric and that all conversions should use customary as the main system (thus not actually showing children the advantages that are inherent in the metric system) do not advance a students education either. Not only does this do a disservice to our children, but it leads to them re-learning measurement in order to complete university level studies or to get a job in the real world (even companies like Genentech required metric usage exclusively in the workplace). Unfortunately, there are also cases of students being so dissuaded about metric measurements that they look at science and decide it's too hard because they've been fed that metric is hard rather than being taught metric. As long as the educational standards allow teaching customary measurements, we will have teachers who apply fear based politics along with their measurement education. We should be using the time that would be wasted teaching customary measurements and their interrelations to either teach more advanced concepts in other fields or to solidify other concepts. Teaching using exclusively metric measurements is the best thing for our children and the future of our country so please adjust these standards to either use metric measures exclusively or to only give a basic introduction to customary measurements with all other work being exclusively in metric.
Common Educational Standards
The Common Core Standards Group is soliciting feedback on their draft mathematical standards.
If you haven't already, please take a moment to read the standards and supply feedback today
My feedback is quoted below:
on 2010-04-02 at 23:21
