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Whoah! I was actually kept inside for recess in grade school if I tried to use a calculator for arithmetic, and here, your son is being issued a calculator by

by nrr 17y ago

Whoah! I was actually kept inside for recess in grade school if I tried to use a calculator for arithmetic, and here, your son is being issued a calculator by his teacher. That doesn't mean that using a calculator at his age is necessarily a bad thing, but with the current math curricula worldwide being what they are, I can't think of anything more pedagogically unsound than what you're describing. EDIT: (See also: "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

jacquesm 17y ago
It seriously pissed me off, especially the fact that this guy was allowed to teach a subject he didn't know anything about. Calculators have their uses, simple sums are not what they were made for. Fwiw this whole thing played out in rural Canada, Algoma district. I think they must have thought me to be an exceptionally cruel parent for wanting to teach my child how to do sums in his head or on paper for slightly more complicated ones. Fantastic piece by the way, that pdf, you should post that separately.