>Because you can see a child using a calculator. Besides, a calculator no more threatens the study of math than a word processor does writing, or a rhyming dic

>Because you can see a child using a calculator. Besides, a calculator no more threatens the study of math than a word processor does writing, or a rhyming dictionary poetry. One reason is that if you hand me a TI-84, I'm not magically going to understand how to do calculus. Maybe I could somewhat piece things together, but probably not without accidentally . . . learning calculus. The other reason is that, as I am led to believe, the particular values and operations that happen in the field of Serious Math are much more incidental to the actual concepts in question than it may seem early on. Hell, calculators haven't even really managed to supplant the study of arithmetic. They seem to have settled nicely into where they're useful.