Quote Originally Posted by rockzmom View Post
I can clearly recall being forced to learn metric in grade school.
I think that apart from an understandable desire to follow their own traditions people are generally averse to metric system because they think it's something incredibly complex. It is not! You can learn metric system in 5 minutes flat, that's why it was invented - because of it simplicity (and for uniformity purposes, of course).

You use grams to measure weight and meters to measure length, and that's it (no overlapping yards, foots and whatnot, that drive crasy international students).
There are a few prefixes to make the use of it more comfortable and avoid such mouthfuls as "I need 230 thousands of grams of sand": kilo- (1000 times bigger), deci- (10 times smaller), centi- (100 times smaller), milli- (1000 times smaller).

Thus you get kilometers (1000 m), meters, decimeters (0.1 m), centimeters (0.01 m), millimeters (0.001 m) to measure lengths, and kilograms (1000 g), grams and milligrams (0.001 g) to measure weights.

It really aligns nicely with the decimal numeration we use, isn't it? I think kids in America would have less problems with math if they were used to metric system in everyday life. )