Nothing beat Holy Rosary Elementary School in the mid-1970s. Small classes, hip teachers, excellent friends, and Washington Square Mall, Burger Chef, and Arc Bowling Lanes right across the street. It even was on the cusp of a national movement: In late 1975, when the U.S. Metric Conversion Act designated the metric system as the nation’s preferred — but not mandatory — system of weights and measures, Holy Rosary voluntarily complied, and so did I.
Volunteering was easy. Implementing, as it turns out, was problematic.
In third grade I first learned how U.S. “customary” measurements — the familiar foot, ounce, and pound for example — were completely out of step with those of almost every other country in the world, and it was high time to update our entire way of life by using a few modifications in math class. A new wall-poster introduced me to the meter, the liter, and the gram, which might have been the first foreign words I ever spoke.
At our desks, we continued learning the same old-fashioned math from our textbooks, but followed that with “dittoed” worksheets of customary-to-metric conversion exercises. Then came the rounds of taking turns at the chalkboard, moving decimal points left and right within random strings of numerals.
That’s when my eight-year-old mind suffered the first of many lifelong math-related meltdowns. Until that time, I really had no idea how many things in my life contained weight and/or measurement, but suddenly mass and volume were supposed to matter a lot more than pet rocks and mood rings.
For crying out loud, I had just started to grasp long division, much less the complexities of yards, quarts, teaspoons, and tons when my instructors began throwing around nonsense concepts like kilogram and decaliter and Celsius. And the whole time they were insisting the metric system was the only way forward in life. That’s like being taught to ride a bicycle, and right after taking off the training wheels, they hand you a unicycle and say you’re late for work.
We all know where this goes, because half a century later, America remains nearly alone in the world with its customary units. By the time I’d finished fifth grade, Holy Rosary’s focused metrication was noticeably more relaxed, bordering on truant, and I probably didn’t utter the word “kilo” again until after college.
My old classmates and former teachers remember the great metric flop too, but none of them seems remotely bothered. The same type of go-and-stop embracement happened outside of Holy Rosary’s hallowed halls and the whole country is now an entertaining mix of measurements, where we buy wine in liters and milk in gallons and it’s all perfectly normal.
Besides, the metric system’s been inching into our lives since long before 1975. On July 7, 1866, after Congress first authorized the voluntary use of the metric system, the Evansville Daily Journal wrote that it would “doubtless soon be the only system of weights and measures in all commercial and Christian countries.”
Come May 20, I’ll be whooping it up for World Metrology Day. It’s an annual celebration of the metric system, which means the parties will be about as global as they can get. But I’ll feel pretty conflicted. I’m 57 years old and was part of America’s first generation to officially be taught the metric system in school. I was right there on the front lines, but today I still don’t know a kilometer from a kelvin.
Will we ever abandon the foot for the meter? The quart for the liter? I wouldn’t touch that with a 3.048-meter pole.
