John Kilopascal wrote in USMA 21513: > >I think that is wonderful, but..... If I were to approach the students of >this teacher, and asked these students some questions, like: > >How tall are you? >How much do you weigh? >How far is it from point X to point Y? >etc. > >Would these students answer me in SI or FFU? > >Now, this is only a math teacher. What about the other teachers? What >units are they teaching? It is very easy to teach something and have it >known by the students just for the test and later easily ignored or >forgotten. Teaching SI in this haphazard fashion is as bad as having >sporadic metric usage in construction. It actually hurts the cause. People >will remember that at one time there was only one system in use in this >country. Without a practical plan, all we have done is add more units to >the collection, without taking the others away and thus in most peoples >minds, metric has made life more confusing. > >All these little drips and drops here and there are not the answer. And >never will be.
I beg to differ. Lord Beaverbrook, newspaer tycoon, remarked "There is no such thing as bad publicity; there is only publicity". When those children grow up and are faced with the full complexity of ifp they will realize that there are simpler ways of measuring things. I believe that Canadians accepted metric more easily because generations had met metric in high school science classes. Joseph B.Reid 17 Glebe Road West Toronto M5P 1C8 Tel. 416 486-6071
