sells to end users anyway. TI still makes all kinds of application processors (OMAP) and other semiconductors…
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I teach grad school, and I concur. It’s babysitting, mostly, with occasional flashes of brilliance.
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But how? Is she using it for everything a scientific calculator can do? I’m not faulting you or your daughter of course- I too, was required to have a graphing calculator in high school. I can honeslty count the number of times I used its more exceptional functions on one hand, and the number of times it was used to play Galaga or Galaxian on many more hands than I actually have. I took advanced math in high school, too. It’s not like I was taking prealgebra.
Also, advanced placement can save you time and money. It’s just not a lot of time and money. My personal experience (so YMMV):
If you change your major from what you were planning on when you did your APs, then it’s pretty much a wash, but it can get you into more prestigious colleges yadda-yadda… When I was going to be a bio major, it got me out of one semester and a half worth of courses.
When I switched to chemistry, it was essentially like I hadn’t done any advanced coursework. Though I still basically skipped basic English. And lemme tell you, after the English class I had last semester, I’m actually happy that I’ll never have to take another English class in my life. Now I can enjoy literature.
I can tell you as an older undergrad that the professors who complain about the problem don’t really seem to understand how they’re contributing to it. Professors set the expectation that undergrads are pretty much spoiled children, then they act surprised when the students live up to their low expectations.
I dunno, I’m about ten years older than my peers, older than a couple of my instructors in some cases, and I’ve seen my fair share of spoiled brats, but from my own observations there is something else at play: Students overestimate their abilities because having the Internet at your fingertips gives you unearned confidence. At least that’s my strong thesis. My weak thesis is simply that, for some reason, students have a lot of confidence that they never earned and hate to have that confidence disrupted. So they don’t like to answer questions in class. They don’t risk being wrong. I think the solution lies in pimping students.
No! Not that kind of pimp! This kind of pimp. Not always possible in every pedagogical environment, but students need to learn the depths of their ignorance.
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Speaking as a math professor, I’ve seen wide variation in students who passed out of the early Calc sequence. Most of then are fine, but some of them haven’t even heard of a limit.
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I’m still making daily use of the same TI-60 I had in school (and it’s still superglued together to stop my friends flipping the LCD). It sits on my desk next to my computer. A calculator is a very Unixy thing - it does one job very well. Real buttons are faster than a touchscreen or a mouse. I’ve never felt any need for graphing though, I have Python for that.
Back in school this wasn’t an approved model for exams, so I used to ‘buy’ one of the allowed models, use it for the exam, and return it the next day (thank you Argos!). Teaching kids to use calculators - absolutely. Teaching kids to use one very specific model, as if calculators are all so different - err, what?
So, time for someone to make a phone app that mimics the needed behaviors of this calculator.
Not me, I’m not interested enough in programming apps. But some hero/ine.
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I had to buy one of those too, but you know I’m French, so it’s not only an American problem. And since I was in literacy I never even really use it.
At last those are really durable (my old TI-82 still work) so it’s easy to found second hand.
Neither did Leibniz.
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Yeah, a modern, formal, formulation of limits didn’t emerge until Weierstraß. However, I’m talking about the informal version which predates calculus.
Have you had fresher’s flu yet? I get it every. Fucking. Year. Just from living near loads of halls. Horrid, germy young people everywhere. AND all the banknotes I get in change from the local shops reek of mephedrone. Bah.
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God I hope the advanced placement saves us some money.
She’s taking AP Spanish this year and this same course I can pay our local state university $250 to get her credit for the course there. I’m not sure I see the point as the course is AP so if she passes it, she gets college credit anyway. Anyone have any thoughts on why I should pony up $250 for that?
Anyhow, my guess is that she will be able to get out of a few boring Freshman courses and my mom dream is that all these APs will give her a shot of gett into Brown because she’s hopefully checking enough boxes with the APs, the clubs, etc. to play the Ivy game.
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The key thing to the AP classes is that when an admissions department sees them on her transcript, they’ll know that she won’t need a lot of remedial classes.
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I’m not really sure what makes this calculator outdated. It allows you to make calculations using Standard Order of Operations. It’s easy to use and very easy to graph most functions found in high school and college math courses. and the statistics functions are nice too.
As a math teacher, I can attest that it is a real pain having a class of 25 people each with different calculators and each with completely different problems in using them.
Why the price has stayed at $100 for the past 30 years is beyond me.
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Because they have a de facto monopoly on a mandatory product. See @MartinShkreli.
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In my experience, most of my university professors were actually far, far worse (as teachers) than high school teachers. Because they were at the university to do research, not be teachers. Whereas high school teachers are actually teaching because they want to teach (well, the good ones, any way, and I was fortunate to have excellent math and science teachers :)) Fuck, I so wish I could have learned classical algebra from one of my awesome high school math teachers, as opposed to who I DID learn it from, the one of the guys who wrote the textbook. His teaching method? Rewrite the current lesson from the textbook, verbatim, on the chalk board. And then have the TA actually explain it during the tutorial.
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I wasn’t allowed a calculator in a math class until differential equations, the last math class I took at university. If you can’t graph it by hand, you don’t know what you’re doing.
@tropo: HP 48SX was my cruncher. @adonai: still have Tetris on my ancient 48SX.
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Well, at this point the patents have mostly expired, so you could manufacture identical hardware, and probably identical button layout. Menu layouts and code may be copyrighted?
I don’t know how much has changed since I graduated high school in 2005, but at that point all the NY State exams and AP tests allowed basically any calculator (programmable, graphing, or otherwise) as long as it didn’t have a qwerty keyboard or any network connectivity. They didn’t bother wiping memory before tests, and everyone I knew installed a program with notes on formulas, trig identities, integral rules, etc.
In practice most people stuck with the TI-83 because the teachers knew it, and most basically told people what buttons to press whileonly half explaining what those buttons did. I ended up with the TI-89 and had to figure out the difference myself (worth it at the time for being able to do symbolic calculations and 3D plots).
I haven’t yet! Fingers crossed! Its swept through our halls like a plague, (we share halls with grad studies and they’re convocating now which is always a time of plagues!) AND my office mates wife is a grade three teacher, so he’s constantly bringing primary school cooties to the office too! Lots of echinacea and vitamin C!
You Americans make me giggle. When I was at school, and right through to my current university course, I was told “you need a calculator that can do [this task]” and as long as whatever calculator you got met that standard you were good to go. The books and guides given out by the teachers presumed a specific model, but never ever prescribed any particular model or iteration.
Say hi to Nemo
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