mojo wrote:
....
> You can try sending a letter to the county board of education, or the state
> department of education. When I did this, the county told me that they do
> whatever the state tells them (then they overdid it by telling me that
> centimeters were too small for elementary school children to work with). The
> state told me that education is controlled by the county. Buck, buck, who's
> got the buck.
Actually, the centimeter sized cubes (some are weighted to have a mass
of 1 g) are just the right size for all kids down to kindergarten. I
don't have a primary school pencil handy (the extra thick kind) but I'll
bet that the diameter of those is not much more than 1 cm. Likewise, a
centimeter scale makes an excellent number line for students. Not too
long ago, I taught two kindergarten classes. In the first one they
showed me how they measure the mass of the eggs they collected from the
school's chicken coop each day. (This chicken project was a result of a
grant to a teacher there, who also had the kids do histograms by color,
mass, hen, etc.) The kids used a plastic balance and weighed the eggs in
grams (using 1 g, 5 g, 10 g, 20 g, and 50 g masses). But they had not
learned how to add two digit numbers yet, so I taught them how to place
the first mass at the appropriate point on a meter stick's centimeter
scale, counting up to place the next one, and so forth, and then reading
the final answer. The teacher thought that was slick! In the next
meeting, I taught them how to measure lengths of things in centimeters
then we counted blocks on centimeter grid paper to work on areas in
square centimeters of various rectangles. They found out that a 3 cm by
8 cm rectangle had the same area as a 4 cm by 6 cm rectangle, and so on.
Amazing! (This is just past the Piaget stage where children are locked
into concrete absolutism and can start abstracting a bit.)
....
> * I do have a lot of respect for elementary school teachers, in terms of
> dealing with lots of kids with various ability levels, interests, and home
> environments. However, in my experience they are usually not competent to
> teach more than reading (no mean feat in itself). The ones that are variously
> competent risk being accused of teaching outside the curriculum, and usually
> move on to better things. If your kid shows aptitude for math, science,
> geography, history, etc., get the reference books off the shelf and spend
> some quality time.
Good advice! It is my perception that elementary education majors
typically do not fill in their elective slots with math and science
courses. The sciences they take (i.e., the core requirement) tend to be
the non-physical sciences, with the exception of the somewhat popular
astronomy courses. ("Stars from Afar" is viewed the same by students as
"Fish Are Our Friends" and "Rocks for Jocks".) Thus much of elementary
science tends towards pets, posies, and health. And much of what is
taught contains egregious errors. Thankfully, there ARE some El Ed
teachers out there who do a bang up job on sciences and who even include
the physical sciences.
> ps. as for progress from the 1950's to the 2000's, I am reliably informed by
> some slightly older than I am that the schools (at least in the districts of
> those to whom I have spoken) were pretty gung-ho early on. They're now in
> "burn me once, shame on you; burn me twice, shame on me" mode. They now teach
> both (more or less, depending on where you are, which is of course the
> ostensible reason education is handled at the county level), and let 'society'
> work it out. ....
I've been told that explicitly by state education department people.
Their mantra is, "We are waiting for the federal government to decide to
resume metricating the U.S., since they started and then stopped
metrication on us in the 70s." Not exactly correct, but that is their
perception. I can attest that officials in state, county, and city
governments think that the federal government has stopped metricating
and that movement in that direction since the 70s has been essentially
zero. They are not the only officials with those views either.
We've got an uphill battle to continue fighting in which we must show
that in fact progress has been made by the federal government since the
70s. Indeed, the 1988 revisions to the Metric Act, the related Executive
Order, and the requirement for dual labeling that all came after that
time are not "seen" by most people. We have to point to those things and
other indications and convince people that the movement is not dead,
officially or otherwise. I hope to do a lot of that in a few weeks at
the 2001 Business Expo here in Charleston, acting as an agent for and
kindly and extensively supported by NIST's Metric Program Office. The
last Metric Today has the details. It might be good to keep in mind that
we USMA members greatly outnumber the staff at the Metric Program Office
and can press for metrication in many more venues.
Jim
--
Metric Methods(SM) "Don't be late to metricate!"
James R. Frysinger, CAMS http://www.metricmethods.com/
10 Captiva Row e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Charleston, SC 29407 phone/FAX: 843.225.6789
