Same in Australia.
As long as a calculator can spell boobs it’s good enough.
I have no problem at all with using calculators (indeed I wish we had more freedom to use them in our own curriculum). My concern is over the financial impact for poor students. Is this something you see at your school?
I may be totally off-base: maybe there’s a “scholarship” of sorts to provide calculators for kids that can’t afford them, or maybe this kind of expense, totally unreasonable at younger ages, is perfectly acceptable in upper grades.
Ok, so because you personally didn’t have a use for it then they must be worthless. Got it.
So I guess owning a power drill instead of just a basic screwdriver would mark you as just lazy too. Same goes for writing a paper on a computer rather than by hand. What, you mean you don’t want to have to write every line by hand and use up a bottle of white out for corrections? No spell check for you - that’s just for the lazy folks who don’t want to use a dictionary.
Any math teacher worth their salt would never pull the “push that button, then that other one” nonsense so many of you are speaking of. That is certainly a waste of time.
I can’t speak for other schools but mine has a bunch of extras on hand to lend out to students who can’t afford them. Or heck even for those who just don’t want to buy them. I don’t ask why they don’t have one. I just lend them out no questions asked. Lack of funds should never be a barrier to learning in a high school course.
Lending calculators is so prevalent that TI has special school bus yellow ones made for sale just for schools. This way they’re must less likely to be stolen. The regular ones are usually black or grey, though the newer models come in all sorts of fancy colors. Yellow is still reserved for the schools though.
ETA: Man, I wish I had one of those pretty pink ones…
DoperChic, I can empathize with you but not sympathize. I taught remedial math at the local CC for a few semesters and the kids (loosely used) there were mathematically illiterate and the biggest culprit is the calculator. An irrational attachment to decimals rather than fractions, not knowing basic arithmatic, and a constant panic to memorize what buttons to press has completely crippled them for math in any meaningful way. This wasn’t specific to the remedial students either. The calculus students who looked for help in the tutoring center had pretty bad math habits as well (specifically the decimal-attachment).
What a parenthesis is, what a “carrot” is, what a fraction bar/division sign is has lost all meaning to them. It’s just a means to an end with no thought given as to why. I understand that you are a fantastic math teacher and for the majority, a lot of math teachers are fantastic. However, you’ll have a hard time convincing me that a curriculum designed with TI’s in mind is better than one not for high school math (Math up to Trig).
Specifically, the topics you mentioned - data analysis, best fit, probability, calc are all post-trig issues. Evaluating advanced functions I’m assuming to be problems akin to finding zeroes of higher order polynomials is exactly the type of problem a calculator shortcut would enforce bad habits. You have someone just approximate the zeroes of a quartic or quintic function rather than using descarte’s rule of signs and you’ve got a kid that:
a) doesn’t know Descarte’s rule of signs
b) sees the 3.0000000000001 on the graphing screen and is attached to that number rather than understanding it’s 3
c) not practicing the long division of formulae
d) really not saving that much time between the scrolling of the arrows to specify the interval.
Pesky quadratic equations? Opposite of (b +/- sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2a) can be done almost upon inspection if you don’t demand a decimal answer. It can be worked as a radical and a fraction as such and teaches much more math AND physics than just locating where the maxes and zeroes are by approximation.
Analysis of graphs? I’m sure you have the kids change the form of the equation until it’s readily obvious what the phase change, etc. of the conic section are. What benefit does incorporating the calculator bring that’s worth the extra $100?
I’m sorry if this is coming off as an attack on you. It’s not meant to be. It’s an attack on how math is taught in America. The calculator culture is not one that we should be defending. It’s horrible. **Chronos’s **suggestion of a slide rule is one that I can fully get behind.
The TI calculator is not only a joke, it’s an expensive joke. Unfortunately, it’s ingrained into the curriculum and social pressures of conformity really make it a necessity. However from an unbiased perspective it really doesn’t have a leg to stand on. A graphing calculator in general isn’t needed for HS math. On top of that, the Casio, vastly cheaper, is at worst a comparable product (arguably better). If you want to graph a circle on a Casio, go ahead and graph it. You try graphing a circle on a TI and you have to solve for y and then plot both the negative and positive portions separately.
I’ll see your 80085 and raise you 800813S.
Not to be snarky, but did you read my entire post? I don’t allow my students to use calculators for anything other than to supplement the curriculum. They do all calculations on their own. Everything else you mentioned is first mastered by hand without the calculator.
I can totally get behind your argument against how math is often taught in America. I see far too many kids who come to me lacking any sort of basic number sense. Somewhere along the line a teacher let them substitute a calculator for their brains and they became what I call a number crunching monkey. They push the buttons but don’t really understand what they’re doing. drives me nuts!
The funny thing is I’m totally fine with requiring the use of these calculators, but what is up with making parents buy them?! :eek:
Considering all the crap you have to buy your kids for school to begin with, that’s just mind-blowing.
I, too remember having the school provide them when I was in HS. They had to stay in the classroom though, I think.
Surely they don’t change enough from year to year for the school to need to update them regularly?
At $100 each, the cost to but one per student would be way too much for all but the wealthiest districts. I’m in a relatively small charter school with about 300 kids. Multiply that by $100 and you’ve got $30,000. Even if you cut that number by a third to account for kids in lower level classes we’d still have to come up with $20,000, plus replacement costs each year. Each new student to the school would require us to buy another one. Buying one class set, which is basically what I have isn’t enough if you want to let kids take them home to use them. This is where real proficiency can be built, through tinkering around with them at home. Plus, kids can go on and use them in college. I didn’t get one until college. But I used mine all throughout my program.
What is wrong with second hand. there seem to be plenty on ebay.
I had to purchase 2, but as mentioned, they do use them for years, from grade school to college. My son lost his, so I just purchased one yesterday on Ebay for $50. Because so many schools require them, there is a huge used market. Check Craigslist.
Be careful if you decide to buy something different. If the calculator is more advanced, it may not be allowed in the class.
Do they really cost $100 per student when the school buys the school-specific ones? And in any case, a textbook costs near that: no one suggests that that is an unreasonable expense for a school to bear. I am fine with encouraging the students to buy their own, but it seems exclusionary to require them to buy them. And I would worry that saying "It’s required’ but loaning out ones to kids who ask would scare off the timid and ashamed: the sorts of kids who would be most unable to afford a calculator (immigrants with non-English speaking parents, in my school) would also be the ones that didn’t realize they were “allowed” to ask, or that there was any chance of getting a calculator if they did.
And the argument I made that it’s no different than requiring all students to use the same textbook?
Ahh, there it is. Your intellectual caliber certainly meets expectations.
Um, never intended to set off a debate about teaching (although it’s an obvious evolution of the topic). Some short replies to most of the comments above:
Trying to poormouth the school out of a couple of calculators wouldn’t work for about nine different reasons.
I learned my lesson many years ago about trying to provide a “just as good” calculator; it has every downside there is and just leads to an insistence that they can’t do the work without a calculator that’s from the same production batch as everyone else’s.
I still think nearly all of the reasons and requirements are bullshit, especially at this low level; the situation in high school, especially for students that go past the basic two or three classes, is completely different.
Oh - I am also from a family of educators, Mrs. B. works with (not for) the school district and I am on the town advisory board for technology use in the schools. The question, and objections, will be raised at much more effective levels than bitching about them here. I was looking for some input and fact-check, which I got. (And thanks.) That it all devolves to teachers unable to teach effectively is no real surprise and something I already considered.
Agreed with this. My son needed one for 7th grade advanced algebra a couple years ago. I think we spent $35 on eBay for it. I appreciate the joke about how they’re the same price/tech as in the 90’s but the upside is that you have a glut of the same product as opposed to, say, trying to get a used iPad for school and having multiple generations to sift through.
It’s not the same thing.
And the equivalent of making all junior-high students buy the same college-level math textbook to (essentially) hold down one corner of their test paper is what I’m objecting to. There are far, far cheaper alternatives that would handle everything an 8th-grade, and most lower high school grade, math classes need.
Please distinguish, in all further discussion you wish me to pay attention to, between these lower, elementary algebra-geom-trig classes in which the purpose is to learn the principles and practices (in which, IMVHO, a calculator is a handicap and a distraction), and the upper classes in later high school where students actually begin using these tools to other ends and a calculator is a useful shortcut.
And really, teaching calculator math is practical for today’s kids.
When is the last time you had to do long division on paper?
How many Dopers have ever extracted a square root manually?
You need to know what division is, and what a square root is. How to calculate the value isn’t quite as necessary.
(In the same way, users of slide rules no longer had to calculate logarithms or perform arithmetic with them. But still had to know what they were.)
If you’re basing your opinions of me solely on my internet message board posts, I don’t think my intellectual caliber needs your assistance.
Thanks anyway tho.
Good teachers use calculators responsibly, and usually they aren’t needed until higher-level math like precalc. Bad teachers (or inexperienced teachers, overworked teachers, or burned-out teachers) don’t use calculators responsibly, and require them as a blanket policy for all classes starting in middle school, reinforcing students’ tendencies towards laziness and contributing towards them not having a damn clue what math is all about. There are a lot more bad (or overworked, burned-out, inexperienced, badly-taught) teachers than there are good ones.
If a textbook showed evidence that **blanket use of that particular text **made students incapable of understanding the subject matter they were supposed to be learning, then hell yes, I would be against that textbook.
In addition, there are plenty of people who aren’t math people. They aren’t going to be taking calculus or diffeq in college. Hell, there even MORE people who aren’t going to GO to college at all. When are they going to reap the investment for their overly complicated $100 calculator? After their short 4 years (or less if they drop out) in high school, when they’re in a low-paying job, when all the math functions they need for everyday life are on their smartphone, and easier to use there anyway, what are they going to use their calculator for to get that investment back?
TL;DR Read pancakes3’s post above mine for a more substantive answer. Calculators are a tool. If you’re using your power-drill for EVERYTHING, and don’t know how a screw works, or that you can use a screwdriver in a pinch, then yes, you’re an idiot. If you teach students that they have to have power-drills to do anything useful around the house, that’s a problem.
Somehow, I don’t believe the first statement.
Luckily, no one has advocated for that so until you run into an actual teacher who does that, we don’t really need to bitch about it, do we?
I put this in the same category as “What do you mean you need #2 pencils!? I can get #3 pencils at half the price!”
Honestly, your kid will use that calculator all the way though college. Sometimes beyond. I don’t buy the “wear it out” argument - those things will live through anything. I also don’t buy the “what if they lose it” argument - they still get issued school books they can’t lose either.
Standardization is a completely valid reason to prefer one calculator over the other.
The lazy teacher argument probably deserves to be pitted, for all it says about one’s view of the caliber of teachers out there.