I was in school during the attempted switch-over and they went about it in a completely reeruned way. Instead of just switching to it and going forward, they spent all of their time teaching conversions (1 inch = 2.54 centimeters). It was stupid and pointless and traumatized a whole generation of American kids.
When I was in college working towards my engineering degree, I learned to quickly hate the American measuring system, especially once you got up into units of force and things like that. The SI (metric) units are sooooo much easier to deal with and actually make sense. My son is in college for engineering now and he was home last weekend and was bitching about the same thing.
