Dear John and All, I have interspersed some remarks to give you my perception of the current Australian situation in education.
on 2002-08-04 03.15, kilopascal at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 2002-08-03 > > 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? The child's answer to this would depend on context. Children are very good at guessing what the questioner wants to hear. If their grandmother asked this question , they would answer 4 foot 6. If their teacher asked, the answer might be 135 centimetres or 1 metre 35. It would not be given as 1350 millimetres or as 1.35 metres. > How much do you weigh? 37 kilograms. There is no variation from this. No matter how much the grandmother insists on stones and pounds the child simply does not know this old stuff and probably the child's parents don't know any more either. > How far is it from point X to point Y? A reasonable guess in metres or kilometres. But not in centimetres or millimetres. The range of a child's guess with centimetres has been confined to the range that can be measured with a school ruler � usually 30 centimetres � and their ability to estimate with centimetres is also confined to this range. > etc. What size clothes do you wear? This might elicit a response like, 'My waist is 24 inches and the skirt should be 27 centimetres long.' or 'I'm a size 6' (whatever that might mean from each clothes maker). > Would these students answer me in SI or FFU? > > Now, this is only a math teacher. As I said, 'Children are very good at guessing what the questioner wants to hear. ' Schools and individual teachers specifically train children to do this. The unfortunate part � in my point of view � is that each teacher might have a different view on units of measure. It is extremely rare in Australia for a teacher, a school, or a school system to have a measurement policy that contains any reference to metrication or the International System of Units in their goals and objectives. *** [For detailed discussions on the issues of the ways children adapt to their individual environments, I strongly recommend: 'Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives' by Frank J Sulloway (Abacus 1998), and 'The Nurture Assumption: Why children turn out the way they do' by Judith Rich Harris (The Free Press 1998) I'd read both as they disagree on several issues but in the end you will have gained many valuable insights into how best to encourage metrication in children and in schools.] *** > What about the other teachers? What > units are they teaching? English teachers: Avoid measurements whenever they can. Like journalists, it is easy to construct a case for the innumeracy of most English teachers. When they have to use measurement (say to tell students how to lay out an essay) they use the default units in the school's word processing software. As readers of this list know well this means that English teachers in Australia invariably teach inches and fractions of inches (very badly because they don't understand them). In any case metrics is about poetry! Art teachers: Avoid measurements whenever they can. See my notes on the innumeracy of English teachers. The good point however is that they use computer software a lot less than English teachers. However, the software that they do use has its defaults set (you guessed it) in inches. If an art teacher has to measure a picture frame or some aspect of a three dimensional work they invariably use centimetres. Craft and Sewing teachers: Go with the flow of the society's morals. If the cloth comes in yard widths they will specify buy it in 36 inch rolls and then describe it as 90 centimetre cloth to students. In short, unlike the English and Art teachers, they try to be 'metric' but always in centimetres. Woodwork teachers: Use millimetres for all of their work. And that's that. They don't allow inches and vulgar fractions. They don't allow decimal fractions either. They know that kids have enough trouble with numbers without mucking them about with any kind of fractions. Mathematics teachers: It depends on the 'purity' of the mathematics teacher. Very 'pure' ones (in their heart of hearts) want absolutely no reference to units of measure at all � metric or otherwise. The high point of the high school mathematical teaching art is to have senior students manipulating trigonometrical identities involving sines, cosines, and tangents on angles measured in radians � ratios all � and not a (real) unit in sight. (Very pure mathematics teachers are able to ignore the issue of the acceptance of the radian as a unit of measure (by CGPM) by never ever mentioning the International System of Units in any mathematics program at all.) Science teachers: Science teachers are the strongest proponents of the International System of Units. The fact that they formally teach the structure of SI to their senior classes has a trickle down effect when they are teaching science to junior classes. But just because it's the best, doesn't mean its any bloody* good. (* If you'll excuse an old Australian expression.) Science teachers tend to restrict their experimentation to the size of their bench tops � so the centimetre reigns. This is most unfortunate in the case of a student who aspires to be an engineer, an architect a builder, or a rocket scientist. The science teacher carefully helps the student build a centimetre mindset that will never be used; instead the student will begin to learn measurement, and particularly estimation, only after they begin work. In a sense their education is, at best, useless as it has to be re-learnt, or worse than useless if their 'school education' confuses their later 'job education'. Music teachers: What can I say? Metrics is metrical � and that's that. What can you do with people who count all the way up to four: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 and then feel that they have to start again! (Hhhrrmmph � he's married to a retired concert pianist and he doesn't even know that metrical isn't necessarily symmetrical. Think 5/4. His wife Wendy) French and other language teachers: Teachers of other languages do their best to pass on the language of measurement as it is practised in the country of their language. Note that this is done as a language � not taught as a complete system. French for example include words like 'demi' to mean half a litre without any reference to the fact that this also means 500�mL. Cooking teachers: I really feel sorry for cooking teachers. The conversion to metric for them is a nightmare. Recipes can come from their students parents and grandparents who might come from Austria, Belgium, England, France, Italy, Tonga, the USA, or any one of another 100 or so countries, leaving cooking teachers to contend with some or all of these units � either for buying ingredients or for cooking: bushels, coffee cups, cups, degrees Fahrenheit, demitasse, dessertspoons, drams, gallons, gas regulo, gills, glasses, grains, hundredweights, imperial gallons, noggins, ounces, pecks, pennyweights, pints, pounds, quarters, quarts, sacks, salt-spoons, scruples, stones, tablespoons, teacups, teaspoons, tins, and U.S. quarts. And these units don't go away quickly. Whenever the school decides to 'do a cook book' as a fund raiser, the cooking teacher gets lumbered with all the old recipes to sort out, and perhaps to translate. As I said, I really feel sorry for cooking teachers especially because they have no policy guidelines to steer them through this nightmare. All teachers: Computers are now used by all teachers and by almost all students. All of these computers have their screen size specified in inches, they use 3 1/2 inch diskettes, and they have all their defaults of their word processors set in inches. Every day, all assignments, for all students, and in all subjects are set using these computers. >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. Good points, John. I have said here on several occasions that goals are absolutely essential for a smooth and rapid transition to metric measures. Goal setting has to be an early and well thought out part of any metrication program. In Australia goal setting was well done in building, engineering, and architecture using millimetres � metrication was smooth and rapid. It was not well done in the textile clothing, and footwear trades using centimetres � metrication is still continuing thirty years later. In Australian schools, planning and goal setting was not done at all. Somehow it was assumed that teachers would know what to do � wrong! In the absence of any direction school teachers, schools, and school systems randomly selected from their own vaguely remembered personal histories. They usually adopted one or other variations of the old cgs systems, and very rarely (and only in secondary schools with strong science departments) an early 20th century variation of the mksA system. To the best of my knowledge no school and no school system in Australia has ever adopted the goal of using the International System of Units (SI) as their official system of units. The metric systems used in Australian schools are essentially pre 1948. > All these little drips and drops here and there are not the answer. And > never will be. I like drips and drops. I enjoy them when they happen, because they give me the illusion of progress in a world that often seems to be imminently retrograde. However, I agree with John, drips and drops, while they are good � and I like them � are not the answer. We need a paradigm change. I had hoped that the demise of the Mars Climate Orbiter might have had a greater effect, but, alas, we need something else, and I hope it's not an even bigger disaster. Cheers, Pat Naughtin CAMS Geelong, Australia
