When metric is taught in American schools, it’s taught in the “unit conversions” chapter of the math book or the science book. Students are encouraged to use a simple fraction multiplication and a conversion factor to go from one unit to another. This requires that you know the conversion factor. For Celsius and Fahrenheit you have to know the 1.8, the 32, and how those fit into the formula. For centimeters and inches you have to know the 2.54. Who’s going to remember any but the most common ones?
So, clearly conversion is not the same thing as being conversant in a different system.
If you’re learning a new language, say Spanish, in an American classroom often they teach it to you in English and homework is a whole lot of translating. This leaves students struggling thinking that to speak a foreign language is to be super fast at translating. This is so far from the actual process of acquiring a new language to be laughable.
If you want to learn Spanish, you do it in Spanish, building up your vocabulary from context not from a dictionary. It’s all about created new associations from context.
My friends, that is also exactly how one should approach learning metric. It should be about create new associations rather than doing translation or conversion.
Here’s an example: You’re in your house in the morning. You look up the weather in celsius. Say it’s 5 degrees. Well, know you can train your brain to do one of two things. You can either multiply by 2 and add 30 and say to yourself “That’s about 40 degrees fahrenheit, I’ll need some gloves today,” OR walk outside and say to yourself “This is what 5 degrees celcius feels like.”
The system here is to do the latter.
The next day when it’s -2 C rather than try to convert to fahrenheit walk outside and say “This is what -2 C feels like. I wish I had my earmuffs.” Make a mental note of the need for earmuffs. Slowly like this you build a set of contextual associations.
I’m currently working on 24 hour time. When I see my clock and it says 23:25, I could subtract 12 and say, “Oh it’s about 11:30pm” or I can say “This is what 23:25 is like, do I feel like I should go to bed soon, or what do I feel?”
Think of all the times you’ve looked at the time and gotten an emotional response and association with it. For example, if I say 6:30am I’m sure you have a thousand memories of that time of day. If I say 7:30pm you know the night is young, but you don’t feel that same sense of promise when I say 19:30 do you? Learning the new system is about reprogramming yourself to feel those time of day emotions with the new set of numbers.
I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’ve had a lot of luck with celcius and I’m currently working on time, and soon will move to liters and grams.