Students measure up

Suzie Harrison

Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile, especially if they’re

using the wrong unit of measurement.

Paula Pitts’ third-graders at El Morro Elementary School got a

lesson in standard units of measurement, as well as a lesson in how

the rest of the world measures up.

“How are Americans different than most of the world?” Pitts asked.

“We’re renegades in the sense that the whole world would love the

same system of measurement and we’re moving one step toward that.”

The students will be learning the basic units; learn what they

mean and the different tools that are used. For its experiment, the

class was to break up into groups. As a group it would measure the

width and length of a standard desk.

“We’ll discuss the results by groups, we’ll talk about standards,”

Pitts said. “We will make meter tapes and we will only deal with

metric measurement for our test.”

Before the class divided into groups, it had a discussion about

some key issues.

Pitts asked the class why standards are important. It seemed as if

whenever a question was asked the whole class wanted to share

thoughts.

“We wouldn’t know how big the Empire State Building is or

anything,” one boy answered.

Madison Lamb, 9, said that if there weren’t standards then

everything would have to just be an estimate.

“If [we were] measuring our desks, it would all come out

different,” Madison said.

Pitts explained that the standard of measurement the class would

use for this exercise would be straws, and then she handed them out

to each team.

“We’re going to see if this will work as the standard and be

accurate,” Pitts said. “Measure anybody’s desk because they’re all

the same and we’ll see what we come up with.”

Huddled in their groups with measuring unit in hand, the children

were giggling and enjoying their scientific endeavor. The groups

recorded work on the white board and the class was ready to discuss

the results.

What it noticed is that there were many discrepancies. The

students soon found out that Pitts had tricked them, handing out

straws that varied in length.

“Why aren’t the measurements the same?” Pitts said. “Because the

straws were different in length.”

She told them that in science it’s called a discrepant event,

explaining that it is the difference in what one thinks they have and

one actually has.

“The experiment was fun because you use things like straws, which

is not like using a ruler, which would be really easy,” Morgan Lebby

said. “You have to guess it and try to figure it out with any type of

standard measurement.”

Tara Board, 9, said that she liked learning the term discrepant

events.

“The funnest part was figuring out what Mrs. Pitts had done --

that she tricked us by making the straws uneven.”