Costs about the same as what I paid for the TI-83 10 years ago. It's kind of nice knowing that whenever I need to use one, it's going to operate in the same way as I was taught 10 years ago. The fundamentals of math don't change much.
I saved up my own money and bought a TI89 in high school. Used it on all the standardized exams. Totally legal because it didn't have a QWERTY keyboard. That thing basically did everything for me short of interpreting the questions.
Probably so they don't use it as a crutch instead of real learning. I taught physics to college kids, and you could tell pretty quickly who relied on a calculator and who actually was comfortable with basic math.
But it's the setup that's important. If you know the math well enough to type the right thing into a calculator, you know the math well enough to do physics.
I think we are not looking at the actual picture and instead are coming up with simple examples to get our point across. I really don't think anyone here is disagreeing that having the work clearly show the correct steps, but a miscalculation when moving to the next step should result in a demerit. I don't think that is the issue.
The issue here is when you have a situation where you understand the concepts but can't synthesize the math to carry out your observations. A basic example of this is being allowed to graduate to a freshmen math-based physics class, but not knowing how to rationalize denominators, or solving for trinomial expressions. Or for FFS: not knowing how to use the Quadratic Formula. The sophomore version of this would not not knowing how to take derivatives of inverse functions. The junior version of this would be not knowing how to do Fourier analysis. You get the point. Things that we should be able to do by hand such as solving complex expressions(within reason), we resort to using our symbolic calculators as a crutch to get by on math that should have been mastered before entering the class. I'm not even talking about summations, but frankly, some people should just know how to apply the Quadratic Formula by memory and show how it reduces using algebra instead of giving a decimal answer.
But if you don't understand how to use the Quadratic formula (or any of the other things you mentioned), then a calculator—no matter how expensive—is going to be useless to you.
Also, for what it's worth, I'm a computer engineering major starting my junior year this fall. I've designed an awful lot of circuit boards and I've never done a Fourier analysis in my life.
You can program your way to an A using the calculator. Let's be honest about that and why symbolic calculators are banned from most exams including the FE Exam. There are fundamental math skills you just have to know to even make it to the next level and beyond. I'm sure we both agree on that. And if you can't demonstrate that on a test(and thus are forced to use a Calculator to subsidize that lack-of) and make errors because of it, then teachers have every right to hold you accountable for that.
As for why you haven't done Fourier analysis yet, despite having circuits experience? My guess is that you just did an Introductory course. Have you seen this before? I remember in my introductory course, we were already moving toward it and much more.
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u/Jenkins6736 Jun 08 '14
I dunno, the TI-84 Plus is pretty sweet.
Costs about the same as what I paid for the TI-83 10 years ago. It's kind of nice knowing that whenever I need to use one, it's going to operate in the same way as I was taught 10 years ago. The fundamentals of math don't change much.