Students Learn to Measure Up in Meters

Students with tape measures swarmed over the asphalt outside Haskell Avenue Elementary School. On Metric Day, measuring everything was fair game.

“Are you 2 meters?” asked fifth-grader Stephanie Spencer while pressing a one-meter piece of orange yarn into a visitor’s leg. “I have to find something that’s 2 meters!”

Students in the school’s math and science magnet program engaged in a variety of activities Thursday designed to encourage understanding of the metric system, part of a national observance. Children estimated objects’ weight, measured their height, built towers of wooden cubes, broad-jumped along a chalk line--all in grams, liters and meters.

One area of the playground was set up to determine whether people were “squares” or “rectangles.” Those whose arm span is equal to their height are considered squares; others are rectangles.

In the magnet program, students have adjusted to metric. But teachers say the system needs to be appreciated in everyday contexts, like grocery shopping.

Fifth-grader Scott Honowitz didn’t appear too enthusiastic as he used a simple scale to balance plastic squares of varying weights. Asked whether he enjoys thinking metric, he smiled, wrinkled his nose and let out a short “no.”

After a pause, he added, “I guess if everybody converted, I could get into it.”

Martha Wood, a first- and second-grade teacher, wasn’t surprised by Scott’s reaction. She said the goal of the annual Metric Day isn’t to convert students, rather to educate them.

“They can enjoy the things we’re doing not so much because it’s metric but because it’s fun,” she said.