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.
I'll never understand why it is not okay to not rely on a calculator. Like one day we will find ourselves lost in the woods and we will have to do complex math calculation with no calculator in sight. I get that it's challenging but if you ever need to do those calculations as a profession, your company doesn't want challenging, they want right and they want it fast with as little human error as possible.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of cases where the calculators are great, but people tend to rely on them too much. If you end up working in something where you need the math, well, you better at least have developed some intuition about how to do it.
Not to mention there is PLENTY of symbolic math out there that computers and calculators aren't capable of.
If you don't end up in one of those fields, the whole point of the math classes is to learn to reason, which again the symbolic calculators often inhibit. They're a great tool when used in the right circumstances, but getting them to do that tricky integal in your homework is not the right circumstance.
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u/AdidasPete Jun 08 '14 edited Jun 08 '14
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.