Re: Use of newer, very high power calculators? Message #6 Posted by Ed Look on 2 Aug 2007, 10:37 p.m., in response to message #5 by Don Shepherd
Ah, Don, I only teach my kids at home... well, I try to. I do teach college level chemistry and physics, but even there I see this very frightening erosion of:
estimation skills,
calculational skills,
increased difficulty with things abstract
GameBoy, XBox, PS2, TV, even calculators add to this. I truly wish the elementary and middle school... even high school curricula would just resist scratching the itch and not include the use of calculators.
There was once here a very bright high school poster to this board, Ben Salinas, I believe, but kids like that are rarer than we'd like to think, and yes, he and some of his friends benefited from using HP 32SII's, 49G's, etc., as they already knew how to handle equations, integration, problem solving, etc. But most other kids will simply use it... and the computer... to lighten the load and skip the drudgery, without realizing that the drudgery IS the gold.
If I'm honest with myself, I'd admit that at that age, even though computers were room-sized affairs, home computers were science fiction, and video game???... you mean pinball down in the arcade?... I'd just use an electronic calculator as a crutch, just like that.
Fortunately for me, I first was able to obtain (at great personal cost; my folks were not interested in paying relative megabucks for this calculating thing) a calculator very late in high school and did not get my programmable scientific HP until college. At least by then, I wanted to learn stuff. But earlier? I was a kid, like today's.
My vote- calcs out of school until late high school.
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