Dear Jim and All,
You, and many teachers, might find this page useful:
http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/paper_rulers/UnstableURL/rules_mm.pdf
I found this through the http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/ web page
where there are many other useful metric resources.
As usual, I do not recommend the centimetre based rulers from the
paper based rulers section, see http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/centimetresORmillimetres.pdf
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia
On 2009/05/18, at 4:04 AM, James R. Frysinger wrote:
Until I was able to remove all rulers with any inch markings on
them, we had a problem like this in our Introductory Physics (PHYS
101) labs at the College of Charleston (SC); never mind confusion at
the third grade level!
Here's a story that exemplifies that and that shows my motivation
for outshouting the faculty on the philosophy of dual-unit rulers.
My cork finally blew when some students measured and reported the
length of a wooden block as 4.13 cm. I disputed that and asked them
to show me how they got that result. They held a dual-unit ruler up
to the wooden block and then showed me the "mark" that they read ...
4-13/16 inches. Yep, there's the four on the last big mark and just
count up to 13 on the smaller marks, so that's 4.13 and since we're
in physics it must be centimeters. Right? Argh!
I immediately broke all the dual-unit rulers and dual-unit meter
sticks up into small pieces and threw them away. All that remained
were metric-only meter sticks and the metric-only rulers that NIST
had freely supplied me with. This caused quite a flap in the
department (I could have been fired as lab manager) but I prevailed
and on the next edition of lab manuals that I published all non-
metric values disappeared as well. I did those in LaTeX and the old
Word files disappeared, too. Since only a few of the faculty knew
how to do LaTeX, and those were very senior people, nobody was able
to undo my editing. Some were happy to see me retire a few years
later.
Engineers will be third to last to metricate, physicists second to
last, and astronomers dead last.
By the way, I use 500 mL bottles of water as "very close to half a
kilogram" and 1 L bottles (or two 500 mL bottles) as "very close to
1 kg" as examples. Let folks heft them and compare the heft of other
objects.
Jim
Michael Payne wrote:
....
The interesting question to me was a picture of a green bean with
an inch ruler marked in inches only with 3 graduations in between
(for 1/4, 1/2 & 3/4 inches). The question was how many inches is
the bean? To me it was 3-3/4 inches.
The kid marked down 3.3. The teacher put down 3.5 (in red) crossed
that out and put 4. Kids see calculators, they count the
graduations and that becomes a decimal, hence 3.3.
This is a good example of how and why the US does so poorly in math
and science when compared to other nations.
....
Mike Payne
--
James R. Frysinger
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Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
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