Generally, I like it. I have a few comments, though. The first couple won't be too controversial. Is the little anecdote about lengthening stride to 1 m realistic? I'm 1.94 m tall, and my natural stride is about 0.9 m. Marching against a grid, I can stretch it out to 0.9144 m (yes, you know where that comes from), and maintain it after the grid ends. I think 1 m would be a struggle for me, and 0.75 - 0.8 m is a normal stride for someone of average height. In the table of metric prefixes at the end, I like the reference dimensions. Is your medium wave band different from ours? The 1 km wavelength is a frequency of about 300 kHz; our longest MW is barely over 0.5 km. I would drop the "buckets of zeroes" column. I would recommend the extreme prefixes (outside milli- to kilo-) NOT be taught until the students understand scientific notation. Counting off 24 zeroes is not a particularly useful skill, nor is a column showing it. Now for the controversy. We disagree about whether the centimeter is ever useful. I may accept that teaching millimeters-only was a good model for not very numerate construction workers who were not properly educated in the SI in school. There are a few recommendations I do not accept for a proper SI education for young students (although there is plenty of room to debate at what grade level these are appropriate). *The "fear of decimals" and relying solely on integer millimeter measurements may represent inadequate math education for these kids. Non-integers occur in the real world. In automotive, our standard dimensions are to the nearest 0.1 mm and MANY (perhaps the majority) of part dimensions are NOT round millimeters. *It is one thing to not use centi-, deci-, deka-, and hecto-, and another to not teach them. A bottle of wine in the US is typically 750 mL, in Europe 75 cL (bad example as the kids can't drink it yet). A proper SI education includes knowing these are the same thing whether or not the unit is used locally. The students should be prepared to deal with use of (proper) SI as allowed or encouraged by other countries, not limited by usage in the Australian construction industry. *I would generally agree that centimeters should not be subdivided. When integer centimeters are inadequate, millimeters should be used. However, even that "rule" needs to have room for exceptions. When calculating volumes, it is much easier to shift the dimensions to centimeters or decimeters beforehand to directly get milliliters or liters than to deal with cubic millimeters. That does NOT make centimeters or decimeters the primary unit of measure; it is merely a useful trick in calculating volumes. Your words against the use of the "unloved prefixes" are too strong and will be interpretted much like the AP's words against metric. The concept won't be used in the special cases where it should be used. I believe you can soften them a bit without losing the basic message. It is much like relaxing the rule of 1000 to make all the units the same in a column of a table.
--- On Wed, 2/9/11, Pat Naughtin <[email protected]> wrote: From: Pat Naughtin <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:49824] Optimal School To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 6:24 AM Dear All, The recent discussion about education has inspired me to polish -- a little -- this draft of living in a dream world at the Optimal School. It still needs more work. As you will read I describe a visit to the Optimal School some years into the future. The observer is clearly an Australian, as you can see from the spelling, but the school is not exactly located. It could be in the UK, in the USA, in Australia, in New Zealand, or in South Africa. I would appreciate any comments you care to make. Cheers, Pat Naughtin LCAMS Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY PO Box 305 Belmont 3216, Geelong, Australia Phone: 61 3 5241 2008 Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com for more metrication information, contact Pat at [email protected] or to get the free 'Metrication matters' newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
