Re: TI-89 virtue email needed

To: CALC-TI@LISTS.PPP.TI.COM
Subject: Re: TI-89 virtue email needed
From: Donald L Peate <donald.l.peate@bangate.tek.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 12:23:37 EDT
Reply-To: donald.l.peate@bangate.tek.com
From: "Tom Lake" <tomlake@SLIC.COM>, on 9/4/98 7:18 AM:

Some skills, such as whaling, calculating square roots or making
soap are being lost but does it really matter?  These things were once
vital
to survival for many people but today they're irrelevant skills.

Taking this argument out a little farther, why teach algebra in anything
less than college. Very few people that I know have EVER used algebra
outside a classroom. In fact, your average sales clerk today cannot
calculate sales tax or make change. Without their computerized cash
registers, they are completely helpless and UNABLE TO DO THEIR JOBS.

In my workplace, many of the tasks that we perform routinely have been
programmed into macros.  When the company upgraded to Windows95, those
macros were rendered useless and several people who were trained how to
push the buttons without any understanding of what the buttons were doing
were helpless and had to be retrained.  Those of us who understood the
concepts of what we were doing and only used the macros for speed and
accuracy had no problem making the transition.

Personally, I regard mathematics as weight training for the mind since it
encourages logical thinking and attention to detail. As in weight training,
there is a debate as to whether it is better to use machines (calculators)
or free weights (paper and pencil). I appreciate the speed and accuracy
with which my grapher can plot a function, but I recognize that I needed to
do the work by hand to fully understand what the technology is doing for me,
 as well as to enable me to understand the technologies limitations.

Symbolic calculators are fine for people who understand how to do an
integration, differentiation, or whatever but if you are just learning the
concepts, is it really wise to remove all the pain?  Muscles don't grow
without pain, and I don't think mental acuity does either.

I would also pose the questions:  How has the field of mathematics been
advanced by all this technology?  What new concepts have we been able to
discover because we have been freed from the drudgery of graphing and
algebra?  Is Stephen Hawking a proponent of the TI-92?

Donald Peate
Tektronix Field Technician
My opinions are not those of my employer.