On Wednesday 07 October 2009 13:55:41 John M. Steele wrote: > How about in English and/or history classes?
No need for English units in English classes ;) History, yes. Besides "battles and dates and all that rot", there are historical events such as the division of public lands, the Treaty of the Meter, and the destruction of Britain's measuring standards that pertain to measurement. Anyone reading old documents is going to run into old units: the tax mentioned on the Rosetta Stone is measured in ardebs per arura, for instance. > Conversions are the work of the Devil, especially as they are taught here. > The conversions between Customary and metric seem to be chosen to make > students dislike the metric system. I would prefer math time to be spent > teaching them to measure and use metric properly. > History is the proper place for archaic units, and a lot of interconversion > needn't be taught at all; the point is to get people to quit using them. There is a proper way to teach conversions, namely by using the definitions of units. When the pupil is learning algebra, he can be given problems involving the gallon, which is defined in terms of the cubic inch, with the inch defined in terms of the meter, and then figure how many microliters are in a gallon. Or given the definitions of various temperature scales, he can figure out what temperature, in degrees Celsius, is the same in rankines as degrees Réaumur. What should *not* be done is give a rounded conversion factor for gallons to liters, or pounds per square inch to pascals, or whatever; or have measuring devices calibrated in Customary or inch-pound units. Some more interesting problems can be made from standards such as ISO paper sizes or Renard numbers. For paper sizes, one could figure out which size is closest, proportionately, to a square meter divided by a power of two and how close the aspect ratio is to sqrt(2). Pierre
