Slashdot Mirror
Calculator Flaw Forces Recall in Virginia
Jivecat writes "CNN is reporting that TI is recalling 11,000 calculators issued to students in Virginia because of a flaw that would give them an unfair advantage on standardized tests. A 12-year-old discovered that by pressing two keys at once, the calculators will convert decimals to fractions. The tests require the students to know how to do this with pencil-and-paper." So the calculator is being recalled because it's not crippled enough. Maybe it's a good time to question the wisdom of issuing expensive electronics to students in the first place, though I'm sure the calculator companies would rather you didn't.
Am I blind or does it say Texas Instruments, not HP?
I remember (back in the day - mid 80s) asking a teacher why we weren't allowed to use calcluators at all. He replied that this was to train our minds so we could do these things ourselves without aid.
Someone else asked "So WTF is with these log books?". He got detention.
Teachers... you've got to love them. Well, someone does.
I am a leaf on the wind
All I got when I first clicked on this was 'Nothing to see here. Move along'. Something about that just doesn't [B]add[/B] up.
Seriously though, I've been against giving calculators to grade school kids for a long time. It's all part of the dumbing down of our society. Let them learn how to do math properly, [I]then[/I] teach them how to use a calculator when they start studying higher maths that actually need one.
I disagree. Being able to convert decimals to fractions is something that everybody should know. Teaching someone to look under the hood and know how things work is important. After that, they can choose to never look again and use a tool if they want.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
that fat fingered 12 yr old should have kept his mouth shut. ruined for anyone else who knew but was smart enough to keep it to themself. seriously though, who is buying calculators for kids learning basic math? pretty soon, the answer to all math problems will be "press the #s on the phone that dail your favorite geek". at least that's what my fiance does.
Seriously, what motivation is there to return a device in exchange for one with less functionality? How do they expect this "recall" to work? Would any of you send your calculator back?
just asking
A goal is a dream with a deadline
It's much easier to adopt a system like in some Universities in Britain where the examinations office provide standard calculators for all students who need to use one in their exam. This way, the exam setter can make sure noone gets an unfair advantage.
On a similar note, Microsoft will be recalling 3 billion instances of RedHat from the market. Apparently all you have to install it, and the secret "doesn't crash or get hacked" function starts working, giving administrators an unfair advantage over other administrators.
It is suspected that Microsoft may make other recalls in light of this recent events, including the Playstation 2, Google's search engine, and the United States government.
In other news, any of you that have hot girlfriends (yeah...you're probably not real, but I can pretend) will have to hand them over. I'm recalling them.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Quite frankly I find it more a crime on teaching people how to NOT find the answer, than to use a god damn calculator, especially as we start teaching what was college grade math earlier and earlier in education.
Perfect example. prof set forth a problem that the class had to solve in 3 minutes. All the students scrambled to figure it out except one. The one got up left the room went to our advisors room grabbed a book and came back to class with the answer.
He got the A that day cause the test wasnt the problem, it was who was going to waste their time trying to figure it out on paper when the answer was staring you in the face on the bookshelf.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Unless it's applied, most higher math doesn't require a calculator (at least the Calculus/Diff Eq. I've taken). Calculators belong in science class, not in math class (unless you want to teach kids how to program on them, which is what I spent most of math class doing).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
In my undergraduate electromagnetics class, the professor was adamant that he would never allow calculators on his exams, but he'd generiously allow anyone to use a slide rule (assuming we could find them and learn how to operate them).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
True to a point, but the TI-89 and TI-92 do symbolic algebra, so that you can ask for the integral of x^3 and it spits out x^4/4. These calculators are sold along with all the other graphing calculators. They do not help students, however. Math is like any other skill, you have to do it over and over again, and these calculators keep you from doing that. Moreover, the answers they spit out are often either in a different, but equivalent form than what the question asked. Plus, they certainly do not show work.
However, once you're done with integral and differential calculus, they're very handy, just like a graphing or symbolic calculator is very handy after algebra. They're just tools, designed to let skilled users work more quickly. The problem is we're putting the tools into the hands of those who won't benefit from them yet. Here's your lightsaber, young padawan; now go slice people with it, don't worry about that force-factoring thing.
I have to agree with the parent. Calculators are useful, but they can quite easily also turn into a crutch.
.3010, .4771, .6020, .6989... and no, I didn't look those up in a calculator :).
I studied in the Indian CBSE and AISSE system of education. We weren't allowed any calculators at all, for any subject. We had to use Log (logarithm) tables. Essentially we would convert any problem into base 10 log and then solve it from there. It was supposed to be "easier" because multiplication and division change into addition and subtraction. Exponentiation just becomes division.
Sure, I hated it at the time. It was a total bitch to do anything, but as a result, I got really good at my arithmetic. Even today I can remember the log base 10 values for 2, 3, 4, and 5...
Even in university, I had friends who had the TI-92 which could do symbolic integration. I had a lowly Casio model. I didn't mind, because I understood calculus and did everything by hand.
Basically, learning to do things by hand is a good skill to have. So you don't rely on a calculator where things happen "magically". Of course, when there's a time crunch, a powerful calculator helps, but it's still nice to know how things work under the hood.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Because mobile phones and calculators aren't as fast or as accurate, and they can cause some serious damage to the mind.
Seriously, while we can't all be expected to multiply massive numbers in our heads and find arbitrary roots of numbers mentally, the more math we can do without resorting to pulling out an external tool, the better. Good mental math techniques have beaten out calculators---with the overhead of punching in the numbers and making sure you didn't make a mistake, to say nothing of having to dig through a pocket or a purse and pull the thing out, then in the case of a mobile phone flip through all of the menus to get to the calculator application---time and time again. Further, mental math is much less error-prone; if you're working on an external device, it is very easy to press the wrong operator and come up with a completely screwed answer, or worse, to press a wrong number and wind up with something that sounds reasonable but is in fact off. Regardless of how good human interface gets, nothing that depends on human input will ever beat the speed of human thought, and calculators invariably add another point of failure to the process.
Even aside from that, knowing "how to achieve what the calculator does" is fundamentally important in understanding higher-math concepts. You might be able to commit to memory that performing x function on y set of numbers yields z result, but if you never fully grok why that result is yielded, then your understanding will be severely limited. The commitment to memory of compartmentalized and seemingly unrelated facts and figures, despite being so overused by primary and secondary schooling systems in most civilized countries, is an inefficient tool compared to concept learning, and will ultimately lead to a society of people utterly incapable of innovation for lack of awareness of the why behind any of the many hows that they have memorized.
In short, calculators provide no benefit over a strong set of mental tools in any of the tasks to which they are set until after the completion of at least secondary-level education, they stunt the mind, and they ultimately contribute to society's decline. Using a calculator for things that are genuinely too difficult to do by head is fine, and indeed the mathematical community stands to benefit from results yielded by calculators, but for things as fundamental as what they are used for in most current school systems (addition, multiplication, division, subtraction, et al), calculators are not only pointless but harmful.
Was that most of my teachers who insisted on no or minimal calculator use were unable to differentiate between the two. In elementary school I did an awful lot of converting decimals to fractions. However it wasn't trying to learn the common ones, it was arbitrary numbers the teacher picked. Some happened to be prime so you'd get something silly that would probably never be expressed as a fraction. I mean who is going to convert .443 to 443/1000?, it's not any clearer.
Got a similar thing in trig, we were required to do operations using sines and cosines without a calculator. Now this would be fine if it was the 90 degree incriments, or maybe 30 or something but it wasn't. It was doing arbitrary ones with a lookup graph. Errr, ok, what's the value of that? You can memorize common ones, espically the 90 degree incriments and it can help make sense of a lot of things. However I'm not going to remeber even an gross approximation for 14 degrees because I just don't need to.
That is the real problem I think is that many math teachers aren't very good at math. I don't mean that they can't do basic math, I mean they don't really understand math. A teacher should ideally have a full understanding of what they teaching, only then can they really understand what is and isn't important to try and impart on those that are studying it only in passing.
My best math teacher was like this, he was a mathemitician before he was a teacher and taught precalc at the community college. I ended up having to take that rather than the normal highschool precalc course because of a conflict in schedule. Now the funny thing was his tests were open book, open note, calculators allowed. However despite that, I learned more in that math class than in any other. He really understood math, adn could explain something to you in different ways, and demonstrate it in different ways until you truly understood it.
I think too much blame is heaped on calculators. People like to foggily remember a past where there were no calculators, and everyone was good at math. Turns out that wasn't so much the case. There were still plenty of students that did poorly and, funny thing, the levels of math being taught weren't as advanced.
So the solution isn't to ban calculators and just do lots of tedious calculations on paper, the solution is to keep the calculators and use them as tools to teach math. Not teach how to crank away on numbers, teach a real understanding of math. Don't teach kids how to factor polynomials, teach them WHY you factor polynomials, what you are actually doing, what the equations mean. Get them to the level of real understanding where they can be presented with a novel problem and apply their knowledge to solve it.
We don't need good little calculators. As good a calculator as you can teach a person to be, I can get a better calculator out of a machine. What we need are people who understand what math is about who can take it and apply it to problems, using the calculators to do the grunt work. If you can take an equation and integrate it by hand, I'm not impressed. My TI-89 can do that and faster than you. However if you can look at an irregular container and use calculus to figure out how to make a container of that irregular shape hold a certian volume with the aid of a calculator, then I'm impressed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, even if they fix the flaw, moat standardized tests give you series of multiple choice answers so you can color in a dot and a machine can grade it. so, rather than actually do the math, all you have to do is check all the choices and pick the right one - in fat, they may be faster than actually doing the math; that's why some GMAT prep books recommend it (at least they did with the old paper tests). The answers were even in numerical order, so yo did the middle choice, then went up or down depending on the result (like a half interval search). The problem is not in the calculator, it's in the test format.
One problem with calculators is that students believe the results and never bother to see if they make sense. I graded papers for an engineering class, I was amazed how many students thought because you get 8 digits in the calculator that the result is that precise; or would get impossible answers (because of a math error) and write them down. They never developed a sense about the calculation, couldn't estimate to check results and relied on the calculator for the answer. You see this in the inability to give change if you add a coin to the payment amount after they've rung it up; or when they try to give you your twenty back along with 17 dollars because they entered 50 instead of twenty for cash tendered.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Breakfast served all day!
That depends upon what you're testing.
If it was basic multiplication, that would be fine. Once you can multiple 2x3 on paper, you can multiply everything from 1x1 to 9x9. The technique does not change at all.
The same goes for 12x11 and 36x156. Once the initial concept is understood all further applications can be reduced to that basic concept.
The same with fractions and decimals.
But when you allow a calculator, you are NOT testing their knowledge of the basic techniques. Multiplying 99x2314 means learning a more advanced technique with paper and pencil.
With a calculator, it is the same as 2x3.
No, "regurgitation" is the memorization of items. If someone can memorize the multiplication tables up to quadruple digits, there isn't much you can do to "teach" that person.
What "critical thinking" is there in accepting what a machine tells you?
But the calculator only gives them answers. Most students would rather use a calculator to "just write answers down to a hundred questions".
Which is my point. Using a calculator at that grade is NOT testing their knowledge of the material.
Yep, and the pencil and paper will NOT provided ANY information that is not already in the kid's head.
Not if the kid does NOT know the technique for adding 2+2.
Yet with a calculator, it is possible to get the answer and still NOT know the technique.
No, that is called "lowering the bar".
Two kids...
one how understands the concepts and techniques
and
one who does not.
Both sit down, with calculators and complete 100 multiplication problems.
Both score the same.
Both get 100% correct.
THAT is the problem.
It might. But more likely, it will be used to mask a core problem.
Which, in more sensible terms means "masks the kid's failure to grasp the concepts".
...
Which was the point I made above.
Sure, the calculator will allow a kid who does not know how to do basic math to score a perfect grade on a test covering basic math
Okay, now you're completely off it.
This line of thinking is exactly why cashiers can't give correct change when the power goes out, the network is down, or you give them odd change so you get rid of change and get whole dollars back.
Setting the bar as low as you suggest begs the question: Why teach anything that you can use a calculator for?
IMO, the point isn't even the math. It's about teaching someone the basics of thinking through a problem without pulling the answer from somewhere.
<soapbox>We're already teaching our kids that there are no losers. Giving them the lesson that you don't have to understand and solve simple problems is just another step towards a society of people who, in Real Life®, find themselves facing problems without the help of a cheat sheet and simply wait for someone else to solve them (which eventually will stop happening).</soapbox>
Another way to think of it:
x = 0.4523232323...
100x = 45.232323232323...
99x = 44.78
9900x = 4478
x = 4478/9900
You remind me of me when I was learning algebra.
.25 into a fraction, and there you go, you'll need a method.
5x=20. Show your work.
For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what the fuck they were talking about. My work? x is obviously 4. You'd have to be a retard not to get it, right? What "work" is there to show? They said "No, show that you're dividing both sides by 5" and I was just baffled - well it's OBVIOUS that both sides need to be divided by 5! Do people really need to be *told* that?
Then they tossed up a quadratic equation on the board, and suddenly I saw the value of showing my work - namely that sometimes you will be dealing with problems that aren't as obvious as turning
Personally, I work best with a practical approach - giving me "real" problems to solve rather than things that are too easy helps greatly because I don't wind up resenting the use of a seemingly pointless technique when the answer is obvious.
When I was teaching my nephew math, I always started him off with non-obvious problems so he'd *have* to learn this stuff inside and out. It seems to have worked - he's now an associate professor in the mathematics/compsci department of a rather nice university.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.