Yes, use all the tools we have but still learn math, science and critical thinking. Use best tool for the job and how to use it right.
I work in IT. Our apprentice students were complaining the other day about learning subnets the binary way. I laughed and told them, we all learn the concept. Then when we’re old and lazy we learn to spot the popular ones /32 /29 /24 /16 etc. For everything else there’s a subnet calculator
I don’t know what kind of jackass clown schools you folks went to, but we were consistently told we would have calculators. It’s just were required to understand the theory in full before using a solver.
We were being told that many, many years before you were born, kiddo.
No, I started time and my social insurance number is zero. I am the total authority on all matters relating to reminiscence.
I come from a time when calculators were being used in high school and I have an older brother where they actually used slide rules. It was when the TI’s came out and the school was 100% not ready for those.
Especially for ascii Mario!
My generation was probably one of the last to have math teachers.
Did yours hate kids as much as mine did?
Specifically my math teacher, 10th grade, yes. Huge miserable prick.
Teaching kids to do math without calculators is like teaching people to do carpentry without a measuring tape. It’s slower and less accurate for no real benefit. Before we had calculators, everyone used an abacus or a slide rule. Calculation aids have always been an integral part of math, and knowing how to properly apply them makes you better at math (faster, more accurate, deeper understanding). We literally developed computers in the first place so we could do less mental math because it is so unreliable.
Why does the logic of technology/industry fall apart for calculators? I’ve never understood it. There’s no other field where we perceive “lack of tool use” to be an advantage.
I mean finger painting is taught to just know how to do it that way. There is merit to knowing how to do things with limited tools available. The basketball analogy falls flat though. that one is like doing math without numbers.
I always thought this was a bad argument anyway. The point of learning arithmetic was to develop your ability to reason and to learn study skills and habits. A similar argument could be you won’t always have a car so you’d better learn to run. But I don’t run because I’m worried I won’t have transportation. I run/hike to stay fit.
Exacty. A calculator is useless if you don’t know how to structure the problem and what and how to calculate it.
Somewhere around 40?
I goated the system. I wore one of those calculator watches.
While we heard it said, and more often the more specific realistic version was that you wouldn’t always have a calculator on the tests through college, there is a few more proper reasons that still apply. Knowing how the equations work, as well as that they exist. You can look them up and will probably build an excel spreadsheet at work but even using AI today it’s vital that you can check the work. It also effects your brain development. If you’re running calculations in your head while doing them by hand it develops parts of your brain and eventually lets you think in math terms. The effort required probably also does a good job of sorting people out of career paths. I don’t want planes flying around me that were “vibe calculated”
I was told that employers wouldnt want me to need to look everything up, which was the argument against open book tests.
Meanwhile, my job is BEGGING me to use Chatgpt instead of my expertise.
I don’t remember being told that, only that we weren’t allowed to use calculators yet, period.
Coincidentally we started to be allowed to use calculators around the first iPhone’s release date. I don’t think those things had anything to do with each other though. 😛
what class was the first to allow calculators? I wasn’t allowed to use it in math until sophomore year of HS.
They said it to us, even as I’d go home to my father wearing this watch.
I had that watch while teachers told me that.
I heard this line while wearing this in middle school
Did you keep it in your pockets? didn’t think so, teacher was right then, uninstall your root drive now.
Interestingly, this phrase was really only plausibly used for about 33 years - the time between the first fully electronic calculator and the first smartphone.
Nope, even the earliest mobile phones have had calculators built in (talking about commercially available mobile phones here, nor the suitcase sized monstrosities of the 80s).
I did a little bit of homework on an old mobile phone (had downtime). How hard could it be? It was bad.
I almost wrote “calculator/sliderule/abacus” for that reason
Maybe I’m not remembering how they work correctly, but I thought sliderules and abacus…es…abacuses? abacii?.. just helped you repeat operations and keep track of the work you’d done, rather than executing mathematical functions for you
Sliderules definitely do operations for you. The basic multiplication sliderule uses logarithmic scales to do multiplication by addition. Abaci (it is in fact a Latin word that takes the -i plural, but “abacuses” is generally acceptable) do just help you keep track, but I believe you can use clever tricks to mechanically simplify complex operations.
this phrase was really only plausibly used for about 33 years - the time between the first fully electronic calculator and the first smartphone.
Not even that long.
I went to middle school during the 80s, when calculator watches were a major hype (had one myself at some point).
Even back then, 40 years ago, none of my teachers would have used that phrase.
It was just too clear already, that technology was already overtaking the assumptions made by that phrase.
Is Texas Instruments even a company still?
They’re huge, but the calculators are the only thing they sell to consumers. Mostly they make wholesale components for other companies IIRC
Yep and they make a lot more than calculators, as I found out the other day. Was recently looking up desktop DACs (basically audio processors and amps for your PC) and a bunch of them had Texas instruments chips in them, to my surprise.
well, they were right. i do leave the phone behind at least a couple times a week when i go out.
It’s unnecessary now anyway… In 2026, it seems math education is having a Renaissance, but meanwhile kids can barely read.
