Permanently Deleted
It’s easy to pick up because it’s an actually sane and good system of measurement, so one day we just find ourselves in a random high school science class that uses it and it’s not a problem.
I guess so, but it seems like extra work to teach kids a bunch of units… Then teach them a bunch of new ones later. Why not just switch the whole country to metric and cut out the extra fat?
Metric is taught and high school and college all over the US afaik. In my college we pretty much never used anything but metric. Mainly where metric isn’t used is certain industries that refuse to get with the times, like construction and aerospace, and among older folks who weren’t taught metric.
As others covered, base-10 is simple and compatible with the way kids are taught numbers so for everything besides temperature it’s pretty easy. And as pointed out all science is metric so if you pursue it in higher ed it’s not like you’re converting between the two a lot.
Kids use rulers from an early age too and those usually have metric on one side and imperial on the other so they get introduced to the idea that there’s different units to measure the same thing.
Honestly the real infuriating thing is that you have to use imperial when you’re an adult because that’s what devices are incremented in and what material dimensions are advertised as.
Like do any mildly complex carpentry and you’ll instantly wish a metric tape measure was easy to come by and that the standard framing timber was a 4x9 or whatever the metric equivalent is to an imperial 2x4 (1.5 in by 3.5 in).
Unless you’re the sort of masochist that likes fraction arithmetic
There are 8 million things holding American students back, this is just another thing to add to the pile tbh. If important people cared they’d do something about it, but they don’t even care if kids can eat, so…
On a personal level, “science calculations” are just a separate, usually academic thing. They stay in the domain of scientific calculations. If you want a more intuitive feel for the result, you can just convert to imperial units at the end (like meters per second to miles per hour or whatever). Otherwise they’re just used for other scientific calculations, so not a huge deal
For lower level classes, the professor usually wrote out the conversion for us or let us have reference sheets (cheat sheets) during a test.
The only two units I use these days are pounds for weighing myself and grams for weighing food and liquids. I literally do not know what an “ounce” or “cup” or “tablespoon” is
