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Re: Sophisticated calculators



A brief comment on the use of such calculators--
I teach Math and science in a Japanese Jr/Sr high. Such calculators and
calculators in general do not exist at school. And 90% of the kids never
use a calculator at all. The teachers in fact only use calculators for 10
key type operations in grading. And my 7th graders score at a 10th grade
level on US math diagnostic tests. They learned graphing by hand and do
linear equation type graphing in the 6th grade! I don't know if
calculatorshave anything to do with it -- but the can do mental math and
estimation as well or better than I can in 7th grade!!!!

Doug Benning

In Numazu where the smog from the Paper plants in Fuji makes the sun look
REALLY YELLOW and the sunsets over Mt. Fuji look amazing!


Ludwik's post prompts me to try to set down my several reasons for
what has now become a real antipathy to these things:

Many mathematics teachers are highly enthusiastic
about such calculators. They think that teaching of math and science can
be elevated to a higher level with such devices because "drudgery" is
eliminated and time is gained for "cultivating higher level skills".

Yes this is true at our school, and for me this is "the Emperor's New
Clothing" in spades. In our physics classes here we are witnessing a
shocking drop in basic math skills - both algebraic, and arithmetic.
(I try to forbid the use of these calculators on my tests because
students have used them as cheat sheets - you can bury your cheat
sheet in the middle of 100 lines of code, and never get caught. So
as a result, I found that 2/3 of my regular students were unable to
calculate 0.6/0.3!) See also the recent comment here that some kids
today are " over-calculus-ed and under-algebra-ed".
Are we (and especially the math teachers) taking into account the
consequences of God's latest gifts to educational technology?

We are witnessing a simultaneous and shocking drop in student's
powers of memory, hence my insistence in recent years that they
memorize the few formulas and definitions that come up. This seems
to me to be related to our pervasive use of technology in lieu of
memory and thought. Thus the commonly stated view that everything our
students really need to know is information, and so all we need do
is show them how to find it. This is the one of the most destructive
ideas I've heard in the ed business.
New technologies are inherently seductive, are we really using these
things because they help? At this school there is a subtle pressure to
use these things because we market ourselves as a school which is up
to date. (I can refuse because I have MBLs)

But are they worth using? What evidence is
available that teaching high school mathematics with them is more
productive than teaching it traditionally?

Would those of us who've been around for a while trade our HS math education
for what's being given now?
When these calculators first appeared two college physics profs reported the
same experience with the identical function - something like f(x) = ax^2 +
bx + c/x.
When asking students what happens to f(x) for very large and small
values of x, something they had done every year in their classes, they
were stunned by their students indignant replies, "you can't do that
without a graphing calculator".
Do these technologies really impart the sense of empowerment that
their adherents are claiming?

*****************************************
Gary Hemminger
Dwight-Engelwood School
315 E. Palisade Ave.
Englewood, New Jersey
07631
e-mail: hemmig@d-e.pvt.k12.nj.us
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