One of my students was having trouble with some math exercises (as in, 480 cm. = __m) and I asked him to show me about how long a centimeter is, and how long a meter is, but that was hard for him because he didn’t have an intuitive sense of the relationship between meters and centimeters.

I suspect that the metric system would be much easier for me to teach if it was used here in the US, like it is everywhere else. Instead, kids only see it in math problems, and they never use it for anything practical. Parents are confused by it, since it’s not used outside the academy. In 1975 the US began a gradual and voluntary conversion process that was never embraced by private industry. What we have now is a hodgepodge of metric applications.

To date, there are only 3 countries in the world that have not adopted the metric system - Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States. Resistance in the US, these days, seems to be both nationalistic (”I’m not one for change. I like everything American. If it’s here, it should be American.”) and cultural (”Peter Piper would have had to pick 7570.8 cubic centimeters of pickled peppers.”).

I got curious about the history of the metric system, and the Australian conversion process stands out as an example of systemic change that anticipated and responded to public reactions. The key points I see in the account of Australia’s experience (paraphrased):

  • No industry or group was asked to involuntarily implement a program.

  • The Act contained no penal clauses.

  • Public education by involvement in day-to-day transactions was the focus, rather than instruction by more formal methods.

  • Conversion took place in all directions simultaneously.

  • People didn’t care about the “logical nature of the metric system or the unsystematic nature of the imperial system,” so the government focused on providing a new set of metric benchmarks and avoided irrelevant references to the elegance of the metric system.

This sounds like an embrace of constructivist epistemology, which strikes me as unusual for official State policy, here in the US, anyway. Execution of the conversion process recognized the need for people to gain an intuitive sense of the new system through experience, not didactically. It happened simultaneously in retail, industry, construction, government, weather reporting, and sports.

Personally, when I write on the Internet, I’m self-conscious about making references to units of length, weight, temperature, and so forth. It’s awkward. Not only that, but as the economy becomes increasingly globalized, it seems reasonable that we’d want to “go the distance” and use common references as much as possible. There are rich discussions about metrication (a new word for me) here and here.

I wonder what anyone else might have to say about whether “going metric” might simplify math education, and what observations people outside the US have of our anachronistic units of measurement.