My wife is a secretary at an elementary school so just before she came
home I asked her if there were any of those primary school pencils lying
around and, if so, to please bring one home. There were none that she
saw but she purchased a pack of these pencils somewhere and I have them
in front of me.
The pencils carry the brand name Bridgeport but the printing on the
pencils says "MY FIRST PENCIL". They are made in China and distributed
by Midwestern Home Products, Inc. The package also says that they
conform to ASTM D-4236. And guess what!
Using a vernier caliper (cheap student lab model), I determined the
diameters of the pencils to be 1.00 cm � 0.01 cm. Not 0.4 inches!
Now, I have no idea how other such pencils measure up, but since pencil
sharpeners in schools have those rotating wheels with various sizes of
holes, my guess is that there is some sort of industrial standard for
size on these things. I doubt that the ASTM spec listed above covers
that.
If the group here goes about and measures such pencils and they all
pretty much measure the same, I'll add it to the list of Metric Moments
items on my web sites. In the meantime, maybe I'll use these for the
display at the Business Expo three weeks from now.
So much for centimeters being too small for kindergarteners.
Jim
"James R. Frysinger" wrote:
....
> 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).
> 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.
....
--
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
