Possible death of calculators in education?

[EugeneNine]

(05-19-2017 09:50 AM)c785 Wrote:  At school, we got our calculators handed out (everyone had the same basic TI calculator, I think it was the TI-30), and that was the only one allowed in exams.

Then, at university, they didn't allow the use of calculators at all in most exams. Whenever they did, a calculator wouldn't have been much help anyway.

I got my HP48G for getting work done, not for exams. I use computers for most stuff now, but there's still the odd situation when the 48G is incredibly useful (as is my new toy, the WP-34s). My smartphone also has droid48 and free42 on it, but I don't use any of those very often. It's just not the same thing. If I hadn't already got my calculators, I'd probably get a 50G today.

As a kid, I was told that only those deserve to have a calculator who can actually calculate things without one. The calculator only helps you do it faster, but it's no use if you have no idea what it actually computes and how.

Apparently, things have changed. Graphing calculators are very common even in school, where (IMHO) they simply don't belong (except for the occasional maths nerd who actually knows what a slide rule is).

I came up with a measure of if a professor was decent or not by if they allowed a calculator or not. The ones that didn't allow a calculator or limited you to a specific one were typically professors whose exams were simple memorization. The few who said "sure, bring in whatever calculator, book, notes, computer you can wheel in" (it was the 90's and he had a good laugh when I brought in a commodore sx64 the next day) because their exams required understanding of the subject and your ability to think and resolve problems instead of just memorize formulas.
I actually failed a math and a physics class because the professors were memorizes and that was something I was bad at so I had to understand and derive all the formulas but it was too time consuming for the exams where others who simply memorized could pass.

I've seen a couple modern school books and I think they jump into using calculators too soon, you'll see some how to enter this into a calculator early in the chapter without a solid understanding of what is being entered and why.

hmm, am I becoming a math nerd?