After 17 years of arguing that calculators had made many computational skills obsolete, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics now says it's important that kids master long division and adding fractions. This is a long-overdue development. But I hope that in the reaction against the abuse of technology, teachers don't expel the calculators. Children today start to use these devices in primary school, and by the time they enter high school math classes the gadgets are indispensable. Used appropriately, advanced calculators can take a lot of the drudgery out of math, and their graphic abilities can help students visualize relationships that are an important part of algebra and calculus.
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