This brings up a good point. People are used to beleive that units of measurement have to be something complicate because the USCU are complicate to learn and remember. We have besides a clasification by phisycal property a clasification by application type. Ex: we use watts for lightbulbs and electric heaters but we use btu/hr for air conditioners, or tons of refrigeration for industrial air conditioners (large), horsepower for motors etc. etc. to describe the power. In SI we would have only one unit> watt. Well, it is understandable that since people are afraid of the existing ones, they would be more afraid of new ones. To demonstrate the simplicity of SI units meand to first teach them. But you can't do it without acceptance so.. it's a vicious circle. This is wher we need a strong hand telling people what they should do. Since the American people do not like to be told what to do we go back to the vicious circle. And so on... ------Original Message------ From: Mike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: April 25, 2001 2:58:25 AM GMT Subject: [USMA:12455] RE: Anti-metric rebuttals Dennis Brownridge wrote: > I would say, more like [having to learn measurement] a dozen times, since at > least 400 different units are > used in the U.S., while SI has only 30. I think that it's worse. I saw some kind of lesson plan (I'm not a teacher) for gardening that involved designing a garden plot. The intent was to learn area, perimeter, etc. The students were to be given centimeter paper, and design a garden, using a scale of one centimeter = one foot. So not only are they being given all of these units, they are not being taught any kind of useful relationships. I wonder if some of these elementary school teachers would get the point if I threw a bunch of flash cards with words in front of them and said "here, arrange these any way you like. Now you know how to read." mike jenkins laurel, md ______________________________________________ FREE Personalized Email at Mail.com Sign up at http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup
