Okay, I love my calculator. Sharp EL-5120. It's on my desk at the moment. It's not much to look at, but its functionality means that it rocks my world. In terms of calculator-adoration I am probably in the top 1% of the world's population. My calculator has literally travelled around the world with me (there's no way I'd trust it to any removal company). I'm not a poet, but if I was I would write love poems to my calculator. The only reason I do not sleep with my calculator is that I fear it will disappear down the end of the bed and I will never see it again. When it comes to using calculators, I strongly suspect I am not normal. However, despite my deep and undying affection for my calculator I am sometimes without it, and on those occasions it is useful to be able to do basic arithmetic such as long division with pencil and paper or in my head. This may not be normal, but why should we educate kids merely to be normal people anyway?
Priceless!
The calculator thing is, once again, worse than you think. Many of my students have programmable calculators that let them enter the entire equation then hit solve. They don't know order of operations, they don't really know what an anti-log is etc. To be fair, if I asked them to list the order of operations, they could, but they don't really know what it means in context. Instead, it is just something they memorized.
ReplyDeleteI was the calculator generation -- at my engineering school, we had an annual competition including a slide rule race, and by my time every class got a professor as a ringer for that stage (and they didn't remember how to use slide rules either!). However, my basic calculator did one step at a time, so I still needed to know what step to do first, etc. They don't.
They don't even realize what all the buttons do. I can't tell you how many students I've taught to enter scientific notation with the E or EE button. At this point, I also give problems in the spring purely to make sure they can do a cube or fifth root on their calculators, so they don't discover that they can't on the exam. They even type in the extra zeros (say for 1.500 g), which drives me crazy.
Again, as I know has been said many times here, the problem with the calculator isn't that it makes them too fast. The problem is they don't develop number sense (and I'd include automaticity in orders of operation as a kind of advanced number sense).
However, my basic calculator did one step at a time, so I still needed to know what step to do first, etc. They don't.
ReplyDeleteThat is a very interesting observation....particularly in light of research on "event segmentation" in cog sci. (Just CAN'T get around to posting all this stuff in short, coherent summaries...)
In any case, your comment makes me wonder whether a calculator that went through the steps would be radically superior to a calculator that doesn't -- could a "transparent" calculator, a calculator that made the steps visible, help develop number sense??
I'm thinking of a calculator version of the solution manual.
Chemprof - I'm calculator generation too. At my engineering school we never saw a slide rule. We got good at Matlab though.
ReplyDeleteI do remember having to be taught what some of the keys on my beloved EL-5120 were - but then it was a gift my Dad brought for me when I was just starting calculus in maths at high school.
What we did have at engineering school was a lot of proofs, which was pencil and paper work. Now, when I want to work out a formula or try to prove something, I do it on paper.