Post #4022500

2026-07-22 23:59 UTC

When I was younger, for quite a long time (going back to a ridiculously early age probably because I was mimicking my father's attitudes) I was dead against the use of electronic calculators in the teaching of #mathematics, or at least any calculator more complex than a standard four-banger that lets you do the basic operations and square roots and little else. Now...there's a genuine accessibility issue here, one that's earned me a lot of heat in the past for my dogmatism on calculators, which I eventually dropped merely because I felt like I'd been rightly dressed down for it. But I have been rethinking that position. (cont'd)

Replies (1)

@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 00:03

I think I see how to reconcile the objection. The chief issue with teaching calculator-free #mathematics, as I was taught such stuff, is that it's all pen-and-paper stuff. That can be tricky for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, like physical difficulty with writing, neurological issues like dyslexia, eyesight...there's a lot of reasons people can find it tough to do figures on paper. But there are non-electronic computational aids, tons of them, and these should be in more common use I believe. There's no reason for there not to be multiple devices sold and in common use which aid in basic calculation. The abacus for example, or "Napier's Bones", or...heck there's huge books stuffed with the mathematical gadgets of a thousand civilizations. Human beings have been supremely inventive at figuring out ways to count and how to aid the memory of large numbers and so forth. (cont'd)

Open ##4022574