My son, a 5th grader, had an interesting math problem the other day. I'll try to reproduce it from memory, "Jason" has a string 8 cm long, it is 5 times longer than Mary's string, how long is Mary's string? The question had to do with remainders and what to do with the remainder. They have not yet learned too much about fractions and decimals so I do not believe the answer would include fractions or decimals. I could not advise my son to give an answer of 8/5=1.6. So, taking advantage of the metric units I asked my son how many mm in a cm. He figured out it was 10 and I explained how 8 cm is also 80 mm and told him to divide that by 5. He knew how to do that and provided a final answer of 16 mm. Although I'm not sure that is what the teacher expected it was a great way to demonstrate how simple metric is. The same problem would have been much harder to describe if the measurement had been 8 inches.
Howard Ressel Project Design Engineer, Region 4 (585) 272-3372
