Beaating a Dead Horse Message #8 Posted by David Youse on 7 Feb 2005, 3:00 p.m., in response to message #7 by .
My advice stands. If you want to learn calculus then go to class, read the textbook and learn the fundamentals. Then, after you know why and how things produce results, you might use the calculator to speed things up. Knowing how and why determinants work, or how integration produces an answer, or why differentation does what it does is far different from simply pressing keys and reading a final result.
Once you learn how to do something, then you can use tools to make it easier.
As far as being disadvantaged compared with your peers, I think the opposite will be true. You will get the same results but will have a greater basic knowledge, knowing how you got there.
BTW, when I first attended Carnegie Tech (now CMU) the only tools I had were a slide rule and a pencil. I learned how to manually do everything this calculator can do and it wasn't really so time consuming. Granted, we used a lot more paper, but paper is cheap. How many of you can compute square and cube roots with only pencil and paper, and not using approximation methods?
I suspect that most readers of this forum are far to young to remember, know or care that the fastest plane in the world - the SR-71 - and the rockets that put Americans on the moon, were designed and built using slide rules, pencils and paper, not hand held calculators or computors.
Exercise your minds, not your fingers.
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