Re: TI-92 controversy
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Re: TI-92 controversy
Well, you could have said 'but, paper and pen won't be always around,
and people still have to be able to do something like 152*45 in their
head!'. Students don't learn that anymore.
The coming of the calculator has begun to take things out already
(Doing multiplication on paper, while still in curriculum, isn't
nearly as important as it was. Figuring out square roots by hand has
been dumped altogether, etc.)
I don't see why people can't from now on skip doing multiplication
without a calc altogether. It doesn't teach any math- it's just a bore
to whomever is learning the math. It's that kind of stuff that makes
students put math as most hated course with the natural outcome: when
it does finally get interesting, they are too bored to try. With
calculators, stuff like newton's method can be very accurately shown
as well. And, as a bonus, most calcs actually use that to approximate
roots etc. After using the calculator so much, that might make the
whole newton's method more interesting.
Also, rather than learning how to do multiplication by hand (keep long
division in for now, until calcs can long-divide something like
X^2+3X^3-5 divided by X-2. Instead, learn them some basic calculator
stuff. like solver, [2nd] [poly], [2nd] [simul], graph|math|root, etc.
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