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I disagree that it is inappropriate or HS students to introduce them to fields at this point. If you are doing acceleration early on in your course, then perhaps, but we hold off on acceleration until after introducing Newton's laws, where acceleration comes in rather naturally. By that time, they are ready for some abstraction, and fields have to be introduced at some point, so why not here. It isn't going to get any easier by the time you get to electricity, and if you wait until then, you miss the opportunity to bring in a very illuminating and unifying concept.
If you are talking to high school kids (and perhaps college freshman). Average high school kids... refering to a_g as a measure of field strength or the F/m ratio is a death-blow. They have not been *exposed* to fields. They are discussing acceleration quantitatively for, perhaps, the first time EVER. They have not really discussed what a force is. They don't *know* the difference between an object's weight and its mass. Telling them it is the ratio of F/m, or a measure of field strength on a first run through is telling them that "a_g is something that they can not understand right now. Not really."