Lazy Teachers and Administrators Love Calculators
by pwceducationreform
Lazy teachers and school administrators love calculators, because having calculators means they don’t have to actually teach arithmetic.
If you want to understand why I strongly support banning calculators on SOL exams, you need only look to this article by my colleague at Out in Left Field, More Educational Malpractice. The author notes the difference between the types and level of problems students typically saw in 3rd and 4th grade Math when she was child versus what they see now in a typical classroom. The program she uses in her example is EveryDayMath, one of the most popular math programs in the US. The approach EveryDayMath follows, which it’s proponents claim leads to deeper conceptual understanding, is similar to the approach followed in Math Investigations.
As the author notes, when she was a child it was common to be given 25 arithmetic problems that she had to solve each night, and the problems weren’t easy. I suspect that most of our children would faint in shock if they were asked to solve 25 addition problems which required them to add three 5 or 6 digit numbers. Most of our children get a handful of questions to solve, and they may solve 25 questions in a week. Advocates of programs like Math Investigations and EveryDayMath argue that this is a good thing as children taught under their programs have deeper conceptual understanding of arithmetic because
