Department chairs normally report to deans of the schools their
departments are in. Deans of schools report to the provost and the
president of the college/university.
You've hit a brick wall, my friend. They're going to yell "academic
freedom" until the cows come home.
I'm a stubborn old cuss, though (just ask my wife and kids), so I would
press the issue tactfully if I were in your seat. I suggest that you
find a bunch of neat metric data on the NCRS pages and show them that
the material in this course is antique in its selection of units.
(Attack the material, not the prof.) You might also research what the
American Geophysical Union (I think that's the name for the geologists'
organization) has to say about units.
Then, there's always the course evaluation!
Jim
Pierre Abbat wrote:
This week we're learning about soils. He gave us three problems today:
1. Given data on what percentage of a soil passed through various sieves with
arbitrary names, plot the data on a semilog sheet with the log axis labeled
in millimeters. The sizes of the sieves in millimeters are given.
2. Given the wet and dry weight of a soil sample in pounds, its volume in
cubic feet, and the specific gravity of solids, compute various numbers.
3. Make a compaction graph. The masses are in grams, the mold is 1/30 cubic
foot, and some other data are in "pcf".
Yesterday or the day before, when he was teaching this material, I was still
working on the previous homework and couldn't listen to him. So today I asked
him the meanings of terms such as "porosity" and "void fraction" (which are
two ways of saying the same thing, like "chance" and "odds"), then converted
everything in problem 2 to metric and started calculating. I asked the other
students if I was doing it right (the prof left a bit early and we stayed
late). They were more lost than I was, trying to make sense of a formula with
the density of water in pounds per cubic foot in it - a number every kid
learns in grams per milliliter in the kitchen.
This prof is the head of the civil engineering and surveying departments. I
already asked him to teach in metric and told him that National Metric Week
is next week. I can't go above him to the head of the department; he is the
head. Whom can I write to about this?
Pierre
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(H) 931.657.3107
(C) 931.212.0267
