I will never go away
(until I do)
(because I have to)
I will let other people's stuff go, because it's not mine and yadda yadda.
But there is a reason I like to keep some stuff of mine forever. No, I'm not a hoarder.
Today, I got to bust out my tirade against calculators in math classes, which I wrote 24 years ago:
25 Aug 00
Here is my tirade on calculators. Something a little more constructive shall follow soon.
In 1988, when I took trigonometry in high school, graphing calculators were an expensive new tool and calculators hadn't really been integrated into the mathematics curriculum. We mainly used calculators to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and sometimes even take a square root. However, even these most rudimentary calculators were forbidden my first quarter in trig.
And you can read the rest there.
Yes, I reached back to my high school years in 1988, me being a "computer consultant" at NCSU 1992-1996, and teaching my first college class in 1995 (yes, I got to teach college calculus as an undergrad, and I'm not explaining that right now. I did have training.)
I wrote this 24 years ago:
By all means, students should be using calculators to do the tasks they understand very well. Calculus students should not have to do long division by hand, or even solving linear equations by hand. Students taking differential equations shouldn't have to do integrals by hand. However, students should not be pushed into deep, complex math before they can master the essential basics. We do not need more university students who have difficulty adding fractions.
I have not changed my opinion on this. I made all my children learn to do arithmetic without calculators well before they were allowed to stick their hands on technology.
All three of my children, including my son who is autistic (and not in the "fun" way), can do mental arithmetic. Not because it's "natural" to them, but because they were made to practice it. I was made to practice it. No, we don't do anything amazing arithmetic-wise in our minds. But we can make change, add and subtract small sums, deal with percentages, etc.
But back to my main point.
I re-used this concept because someone posted this on X/twitter:
there is absolutely no reason for students to use calculators in their math classes. calculators are worthless for learning math and a math course requiring their use is a reliable sign that the course, the teacher, and the department are trash. furthermore everyone at TI should… https://t.co/jC2cCbxD3Z pic.twitter.com/cXZDAnfjhJ
- eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) August 13, 2024
Well, that's very much not an original thought. And SHAME TEXAS INTRUMENTS
SHAAAAAAAAME
Kids shouldn't be using graphing calculators EVER
[says the person using Excel everyday in her job]
I remember when I went to NCSSM and I saw my fellow students being flummoxed by the technology use in their math classes, because they were trying to learn precalculus or calculus for the very first time.
I already knew calculus when I came in. So when I saw tech that could do numerical algorithms to try to do models with these areas of math, for practical applications, I thought it was great!
But it was a crappy way to learn the concepts if you didn't know them already.
I realized that once I actually tried to teach other people.
This is a very long way of saying...
....Plato was correct.