MatchboxVagabond wrote:
TBH, it's been a few years since I had any involvement in math professionally, but it was quite honestly terrifying to have students that were at least a year into college math that couldn't do any of it without a calculator. One student in particular was in calculus 3 and couldn't do any arithmetic without a calculator. It's incredibly time consuming to have to go for the calculator for every problem and it makes quick estimates about the reasonableness of a given result a lot harder.
Memorization of squares is kind of iffy in terms of any real value, any of the integers being multiplied together up to about 144 is somewhat useful, beyond that, students have a lot of other things they can memorize that are of more value.
The way it's rationalized is that you'll always have a calculator with you and the concepts are important. The concepts were always important, but you've got calculators that can do basic approximations of simple calculus problems for under $20, but that shouldn't get students in some programs off the hook from knowing how to do calculus.
I ran into someone once who had to use a calculator to multiple something by 1.
By the way, I took some graduate courses in Math and Computer Science again in the 1990s and used my slide rule when I needed one. In one course, we could use a calculator on our final so I brought a slide rule. The prof saw it and picked it up and played with it -- he had never seen one and was fascinated by it.
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