>"Since the 1970s, all American schools have taught the metric system."
Well they've been doing a terrible job at it then, because I'm a European guy living in the US and my US friends never get a sense of what I'm talking about if I use metric units.
Additionally, I TA'd 2nd year level mechanical engineering courses at a very large state university when I was in grad school, and most of the students would get stumped on problems that involved things such as converting a result in centimeters to millimeters, etc, requiring me to explicitly write "1 cm = 10 mm" on the board/assignment papers.
Well they've been doing a terrible job at it then, because I'm a European guy living in the US and my US friends never get a sense of what I'm talking about if I use metric units.
All Japanese schools teach English, too. Try speaking English in downtown Osaka and marvel at the puzzled looks.
People who are taught a thing and then don't practice it tend to get rusty.
Properly "teaching metric units" would be synonymous with using them consistently in all science/math/etc. classes throughout middle + high school. Doing this would mean that when entering college, students would have developed an intuitive sense for the metric system.
If what the schools do is just have a 1 hour class which can be boiled down to "Ok, 1 meter is 100 cm, 1000 g is 1 kg", then I wouldn't call that 'teaching'.
(Additionally, I think teaching a secondary language is a project of a completely different scope than teaching a unit system)
I don't know about others, but all of my (US-based) science classes used metric exclusively. Almost all math problems dealing with distance used metric as well.
(Funny story: I failed a 9th grade math quiz because I didn't know how many inches were in a foot. We never covered the US customary system! It really didn't come up often.)
That said, I still don't have an intuitive sense for converting miles to kilometers, or Fahrenheit to Celsius, simply because it never came up outside of the classroom.
I beg to differ, when I was in college in JHU the text books consistently made use of feet and other imperial units like lbs. Granted there were metric units mixed in as well, but there there were imperial units mixed in as well, often to the exclusion of metric units.
Well, the first part stems from not using the system on a day-to-day basis for the most part. We learn how the system works, learn how to convert, use it in science classes, etc., but don't necessarily know how to estimate how many kilograms we weigh, or how many meters tall we are, how many kilometers away something is, whether or not 38 degrees Celsius is a hot day or an average day, etc.
However, the second part is inexcusable and I'm curious to know which University it is that would accept students that hadn't been through at least one advanced science class in High School where metric would be used extensively and it would be very basic knowledge that 1 cm = 10mm...
It's just about frames of reference. Just because 9/5*C+32=F doesn't mean people will instantly know what you mean when you say 20 degrees C. Likewise, a 20m2 doesn't mean as much to people used to hearing 550f2
It was quite the opposite way for me. Almost all of my engineering courses were in metric. In fact, most of us considered it a 'trick' when english units were used.
Conversions for the metric system seemed much more intuitive for me in math. However english units seemed much more noticeable since they are mostly unique (didn't miss a 0 in a conversion).
Lastly, I agree with a comment below that this is largely a problem of getting rusty. After living both in Europe and the US for significant portions of time, I still have trouble between Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Most probably have a functional understanding of it, but do not have an intuition. Is the teaching supposed to provide an intuitive sense of how big certain units are? What difference does it make?
Working within the metric system seems pretty easy to me. it is converting between them that I fall down. So when a French friend of mine talks about the Kilograms of weight he lost or the cm of rain they got... my mind kind of goes blank while I try to make sense of it.
Well they've been doing a terrible job at it then, because I'm a European guy living in the US and my US friends never get a sense of what I'm talking about if I use metric units.
Additionally, I TA'd 2nd year level mechanical engineering courses at a very large state university when I was in grad school, and most of the students would get stumped on problems that involved things such as converting a result in centimeters to millimeters, etc, requiring me to explicitly write "1 cm = 10 mm" on the board/assignment papers.