<rant attitude="pessimistic"> This is, in general, a dead end. The schools (corporately) teach a curriculum. The school administration will tell you it's outside the curriculum, and that's pretty much the end of that conversation. You can occasionally get a teacher spun up, at least for a little while. I sent one of my kids in to K with a metric ruler from NIST, sort of as show and tell. The teacher did talk about it, although she mentioned that they used the metric system in some other countries <sigh>. 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. Your best (read: only) real recourse is a) teach your own kids SI (actually, this applies to more than just SI, and they'll get a better education from you*); and b) offer to your children's teachers to teach a segment on SI. mike jenkins * 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. 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. Forget what the K-5 teachers are teaching; when they are doing their sewing and woodworking in metric, we'll have made progress. </rant> >===== Original Message From [EMAIL PROTECTED] ===== >Try a different tack. Urge your school to require rulers WITHOUT metric >markings, allowing a special exemption for you own kids. It's a competitive >world these days, and you want your kids to have every advantage possible >when it comes time for SAT's. <g> > >Nat
