Boise Ed sends this in: “I think they are holding paper clips. What that has to do with the speech line is anyone’s guess.”
As I remember what a grade school classroom can do with paper clips if someone finds some rubber bands, I think I’d take my chances with rulers.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The teacher is showing that standard measures are arbitrary, so as long as we all agree to do so we can measure things in paper clips as well as with inches/cms. This has the added advantage of not requiring rulers which can be used for sword fights.
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I follow Ian’s lead in that interpretation!
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I agree with Ian, but I think cause and effect are reversed. Instead of being motivated to teach students that measurement units are arbitrary with the bonus that rules are no longer available as weapons, they (teachers, school board, whatever) were motivated to get rid of the rulers and came up with teaching how to measure with something arbitrary like paper clips.
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And in that line, some may be familiar with the Mass. Ave. bridge between Boston and Cambridge whose length is measured in Smoots.
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Muricans will do anything to avoid using the metric system.
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Mitch 4 – as in “Floyd Smoots” from Petticoat Junction?
(Just a joke, I presume they are totally unrelated.)
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Meryl, no, it’s some kind of MIT joke. He was a long-ago student and his “brothers” liked to joke about his shortness, and ended up marking out distances along that bridge in units of his height.
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Oliver R. Smoot, the MIT student who was himself the standard for measuring bridges, eventually became Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and later President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). (Source: Wikipedia)
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