I am working on my Master's in Special Education. One of my fellow students insists students don't need to learn long division anymore b/c they can learn to use calculators.
sigh...
#46
I homeschooled my children through 8th grade. They were NOT allowed to use calculators until we did algebra in 8th grade. When each of them went to school, their math teachers, without exception, commented on how well they could calculate in their heads, and how good their "number sense" was.
I always figured that a calculator was just a tool, like a word processing program is a tool. Just like a word processor is useless if you don't have any words to write, a calculator is useless if you don't know the numbers to compute. You'd be surprised at how many of the kids I now tutor don't know if determining the cost of one egg from the total price of a dozen is a multiplication or division problem.