[K.B.]

I'm mostly with you guys on the calculator use. I've had to work with school administration to have a middle school teacher not let all the kids use calculators all of the time. They become addicted. They get to high school and can only do fractions with the calculator. As I said before, "in moderation". The teacher in question now teaches something other than math. Its hard to get real math teachers in elememtary or middle school unless the district is big enough to hire curriculum specialists.

On the other hand I've also worked with special ed students in the high school that test at the 4th or 5th grade level (or even lower) in math. They've been doing "drill to kill" for several years and still don't get it. We have tried for decades to pound the basics into them with limited success. "General Math" class no longer exixts at our high school. We are having greater success now with other methods.

Sometimes we have them do 1 digit math without a calculator.
Like : 2x + 3 = 9

Sometimes we give them a multiplication chart for the next level.
22x + 3 = 47

Then a word problem might lead them to write
22.7x + 17 = 257.3
which they can only sove with a calculator with their limited skills. They understand the concepts of addition, multiplication and order of operations because they have used calculators. We need not punish them just because they never got the algorithims for long division or multiplication. (Most people don't really "get them" anyway - they just do them by memory.) Farther down the road they might be able to use a TI-83 to understand the change in slope by comparing the graphs. Only with a calculator will some of them ever get to see the beauty of the pythagorean theorem.

Way back in my day we used trig tables(and slide rules) to do trig. Calculators have changed that method a lot. Who remembers how to do a square root by hand? How would you do e^1.3 without a calculator? Calculators are a useful tool to help us think, not a replacement for thinking, just about like Bicycles are a tool to help us travel, not a replacment for walking/running. It's not "no calculators", nor is it calculators "all the time" but rather appropriate use at the appropriate time!