To imperial units or not to imperial units, that is the question!

[grey12]

Hi!
I grew up in a metric system only country and never ever used imperial units except to ask for a half pint at a pub 🤷🏻‍♀️ and I understand when people talk in inches and feet (sort of, small numbers)

I am homeschooling my kids and we don't currently live in the UK but we are
following the UK curriculum. Do we REALLY need to teach the imperial units?......
My eldest has ADHD and they struggle with school. We really pushed for them to be held back an year in nursery but they refused. The system is terrible 🤬 anyway.........

I am really dreading putting something extra on their plate that they don't need....... (year 5 btw). Since we are homeschooling we are
not planning to do the Year 6 SATS. Of course if we wanted to enrol our kids back into school we would need to teach them the imperial system. But we need it NOW? To confuse them further?! This ApplePay generation already struggles with understanding money 😅 I feel like focusing on that instead. (Our maths curriculum is going into measurements next, can you tell?)

The clincher for me is that I did my undergrad and postgrad in engineering in a university in London. And I never ever had to work in imperial units 🤷🏻‍♀️

What is your experience/opinion?

Thank you ❤️

I’m in my 60’s. I never learned anything about imperial units at school, in Scotland. It’s done me no harm. I did engineering at university, had to do a lot of unit conversion because of American textbooks but it was not a big deal. I’ve never known things like the number of yards in a mile, again it’s never been a problem.

They neex to know that there are different units for things, but not necessarily the detail of that system. So knowing tbat 100ºF is very different to 100ºC for example.

When back in the UK... knowing miles is very important for the road system! (As in sleed limits!)

They can learn it if and when they live here and need it.

I agree with Shed that it's important to know that different systems exist and that it's possible to convert between them. You'll probably encounter that occasionally, and then you can show them how to google conversion calculators and use those.

On a tangential note, it's good to be able to estimate. That skill comes in useful when you are converting. Teach them to do a sense check and make sure they aren't out by an order of magnitude or more, either because they made a mistake or because the calculator is wrong. "Okay, do you REALLY think we need 0.5 litres of vanilla essence in our recipe? What would that look like? Do you remember the little spoons we usually use to measure vanilla essence?"

I'd say teach them it exists, treat as a fun part of history/geography, but don't teach them in detail?

People educated in metric only countries manage to integrate into UK/US.

And also deal with UK imperial vs US ‘customary units’ which may have the same name but be a different quantity eg pints. Kids in a metric region don’t need this confusion!