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Re[2]: Programmable Calculator Policies



These days programmable calculators have gotten really sophisticated.
The TI-82 allows one to store text notes and equations while the TI-92
can solve equations symbolically and even find integrals symbolically.

I now have a policy of erasing students' calculator memories before
tests or to do without the calculator if the students scream. In
addition, as much as possible, I try to make test questions that do not
require the use of a calculator.

What are some of your comments or policies concerning programmable
calculators? I would like to hear from both high school and college
instructors.

<snip>

The solution to this problem is blindingly simple. I am surprised that
it is not adopted by all schools.

At Cambridge University students are allowed to use only one kind of
calculator in examinations

Ok, I'll bite on this one. I think this question points to some bigger
concerns in our craft than what devices to allow on tests.

My short answers to the original question: you're on the right track in
trying to create test questions that require a minimum of calculator dexterity.
Having a standard calculator will work, but getting an entire school to agree
on one (without some sort of dictate from the top) might be a hard row to hoe.
Banning calculators altogether from your classroom could work, too - it would
avoid thorny institutional issues, force students to think mathematically, and
wean them a bit from their silicon security blankets. (Was it Jack Uretsky who
declared his classroom a 'calculator-free zone'? I have seriously thought
about doing that - and believe me, the appeal of a big 'slash symbol' on my
classroom door embracing a picture of a TI-82 is nearly overwhelming.)

I think what troubles me most about the TI-xx family is that (at least the
way I have seen them used here) they turn students into technicians pretty
effectively. If we want to train technicians, fine - we should use TI's as
much as we can. But I, as a 'consumer' of the mathematical minds produced in
our TI-addicted math department, am not happy with the quality of the product I
see. When, for example, we generate some data in an exploratory lab and want
to know what functional dependence two variables might have, my kids dutifully
punch the data into 'lists' on the TI's and then use a one-button regression
routine of some kind to find what they want. Almost to a person, they don't
know the mathematics underlying what they are doing - they just punch the
buttons and get an answer. I bounced off one of the faculty TI champions here
the view that students would become technicians if they kept using these
things, and he conceded my point quickly and thought it interesting - and
perhaps inevitable or even desirable. Yikes! Now with complete algebraic and
pretty complete calculus capabilities in the newer models, a student could
store all the formulas and more that I would ever cover in an intro course and
be able to manipulate them readily with even less thought than they use now.

I am not one who desires to make Ph.D.'s out of all my students, or who
thinks that the older ways of doing things are necessarily better, or who
worships at the altar SAT II's. I teach kids with a variety of abilities, and
I use a variety of methods, some more techie than others. I just wonder how I
would ever go about doing a better job of making mathematical thought obsolete
than by waging war on it with marvelous machines like these. Can they be our
servants without eventually being our masters?

Or am I just trying yet again to swim against the stream?


Nick

Nick Guilbert
Peddie School
Hightstown, NJ

nguilber@peddie.k12.nj.us