math question?

Question

Some people believe that calculators have eliminated the need to learn the skills to perform mathematical operations by hand. State your position on this belief, and then support your position with real-life stories or examples.

Answer 1

I taught sixth grade for two years. From day one I realized why none of my students knew their times tables.

I am a natural with numbers, but even I had to sit through a few hours of memorization in third grade. When I was a kid, you couldn't pass if you didn't know your tables from 0 through 12.

Then I began teaching and found out that other states weren't so strict. The first day, my kids pulled out calculators to do simple two and three digit addition, and to do basic multiplication.

When I asked them to put the calculators away they were horror stricken. As it turned out, none of them knew the basics of math at all. They just plunked it in and got the answer.

From that point I banned calculators in my classroom. We ended up wasting a month making them relearn the last six years of their education. In the end, they were faster, better and more accurate than they had been with their calculators.

When I tutored my little sister, I prevented her from using a calculator. She ended up being faster and better than many of her classmates who were dependant on them.

Calculators haven't eliminated the need to learn math by hand, they have crippled children and prevented them from learning the basics.

I worked in a retail store for four years and while calculators were handy time savers if I had to quickly total up hundreds of numbers, I still did many bill calculations by hand, to show customers how things worked.

Calculators are handy for trig, and calculus and graphing, but basic elementary school algebra? They'll cripple otherwise intelligent kids and they'll wind up hating math because they can't grasp the complex things without a good knowledge of the basics.

Answer 2

Yes it has eliminated the need to learn the skills to perform mathematical operations by hand. Everyone should learn how to do mathematical equations the long way. This is important!

Why? I am a payroll specialist and have had to use the long way on serveral occassions. 1st occassion was because an employee needed it explained the long way as they were older and didn't understand the way I was using the calculator to obtain my answer. 2nd occassion was we did not have power therefore the calculator wouldn't work....hence needing to do the work by hand.

I believe it very important to also do your work by hand to double check it as one slight error of a key can give you the wrong answer. A calculator was made to assist in arriving at the answer not to always supply the answer.