this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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When I was a kid and they were parroting that dumb shit, I already had a calculator wristwatch. In fact, I probably bought that calculator watch specifically because my teachers kept saying that. Even back then it was well within the budget of a 6th grade punk who shoveled a couple of driveways or mowed a lawn or two.
I get being annoyed by the excuse when your kid, but it's bizarre seeing adults still harping on this decades later.
You couldn't use a calculator in math class for the same reason you couldn't use a segway in gym class. Because there's a lot more going on in a math class than just teaching you how to enter the correct answer.
Like... presumably most people here took some college of some kind, it shouldn't be hard to grasp that education is a complex and multifaceted thing. It was never just about getting every answer right.
I absolutely agree with you. I do still laugh at the meme, though. It's not because I think my teachers were wrong for teaching basic arithmetic; it's just that "because you won't have a calculator in your pocket" turned out to be an ironically bad reason. 100% still glad to have learned it, though.
What's monumentally moronic is that a tiny subset of teachers still try to use this line, here and now, in AD 2023. It was still quite highly moronic in the years of my school career, which was happening just on the cusp of the computing revolution -- which everyone at the time with at least one functioning brain cell could see looming in all its inevitability just about 6" over the horizon.
Outside of basic arithmetic this canard doesn't really hold water. Understanding how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide arbitrary numbers without a calculator is, of course, essential. But once that's understood, it's really unnecessary to have to stop to figure out by hand whatever the fuck, say, 23 divided by 4081.75 is when it's just one component of some greater problem. In that context, using a calculator is not a "cheat," even though some educators to this very day cling to the belief that it is. If you are doing algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. it's really pointless not to use a calculator for the tedious small stuff, because if you don't have an understanding of the mechanics of the problem you're not going to accomplish jack squat... calculator or not.
(Yes, nowadays there are fancy graphing calculators and computer software that can do algebra, trig, etc. for you. You could probably even ask ChatGPT and have a nonzero chance of it getting it right. But back in my day we did not have them, because they were not commonplace, not very capable, and still extremely expensive. And computer software be damned, it was not quite viable yet on a middle or highschooler's budget to carry a traditional computer with you.)
Sure, I still have the skills to get out a notepad and do a long-division-with-decimals calculation by hand, even in my adulthood when no one has asked me to in decades. But you know what? No one has asked me to in decades. So I'm not going to do that standing in the grocery aisle with a 12 pack of something in my hand, or standing over the milling machine contemplating where to drill the hole in the $1200 piece of material. In the former case I'm going to round off and make an accurate enough assessment for casual purposes, and in the latter case you bet your ass I'm going to get out my calculator or phone.
And yes, I had teachers in high school who absolutely did force us to calculate multivariable algebra or geometry equations without a calculator and screech "SHOW YOUR WORK" at us, which explicitly included all the long multiplication and division and shit, when in reality just simplifying the equation and then solving for X, Y, Z with a calculator would have been just as correct and infinitely less irritating. And no, they did not do this for any other reason than the ironclad belief that if students were not being forced to comply with arbitrary rules and tedium in complete contravention to logic, they were not "learning." That was considered "cheating." As it turns out, the point was not to inform. Rather, it was to have an arbitrary and illogical standard to use to berate and punish children. The only thing that was being taught was not to attempt apply logic or speak up, but to submit to authority unquestioningly... or else you get a zero and/or a browbeating/detention. It was bullshit then, it's still bullshit now.
In the university physics classes I took, if the final answer was 47/69, then that was acceptable because the goal was to show you knew how to get there, and the actual value didn't really matter.
Also, when the final value does matter, each time you round a number (which you often do when it's a division you want a calculator for), you're adding error to the final answer. So avoiding using a calculator as much as possible will increase the accuracy of the final answer when there's many steps.
That said, they didn't disallow calculators and didn't want to see long division or multiplication steps.
I wasn't talking about university, and I guarantee you the OP who posted this meme wasn't, either. I think you know this.
My point was that even at university level where the maths are theoretically the hardest they've been up to that point, calculators aren't something that are heavily leaned on.
the problem is that our education system insists on teaching things people will never have a use for, and is utterly irrelevant to what they want to study.
and even if it is relevant, it's almost always taught in the worst way possible, just slapping down a book in front of people with 0 context and then they're expected to take a test on it, which has been repeatedly shown to be actively detrimental to learning.
I know I shouldn't but anytime I see someone pull out their phone to figure out the tip or total on a receipt I immediately think less of them.
I remember being surprised I could afford a calculator watch. First time I learned about them as a kid, I assumed they were some unattainable, bleeding edge tech.
Well, that tech really progressed fucking fast. We went from calculators being a huge industry of mechanical and electro-mechanical monsters to wristwatch calculators sold for 20 bucks in like a couple decades.
Go look at asianometry for some interesting videos on the matter
Gotta love the transistor.
I remember thinking they were so neat.
And now in middle age I’m wearing what is essentially a full blown smart phone on my wrist.
So here we are in the future. I have no flying cars but I have my calculator watch and startrek/dick-tracy super combo device, damn it!
Virtual reality still feels like the future to me, even as I've spent many an hour with it.
Personally, I don't really consider what we've got to be really VR yet. IMO that won't come until we have interfaces that take direct nerve input and override our sensory inputs. And given how our economy runs, I don't think I'll trust any company that develops that, as much as I really want it.
Though I also wonder if our brains can handle switching between that and reality. After playing hours of Horizon VR, I noticed having the feeling a few times that my hands weren't real because I got used to thinking that when I looked at my fake hands in the game.
I haven’t played VR for a couple years, but I played hundreds of hours of it in the 2018-2020 time frame. It has a long way to go but it’s already amazing too.
During COVID, I put together a DIY sim-racing rig with an Oculus Quest 2 and speakers in the seat receiving the physics data from SimHub so you could feel the rumble of the kerbs/road, etc... Between the force feedback of the wheel, headphones, the visuals surrounding you, and your seat rumbling to emulate different road conditions, I constantly felt like, "I shouldn't be able to do this at home!" I still think it's the greatest gaming/tech experience I've had. I sold my rig but plan to rebuild as soon as practical.
When I played, it was much more “drop me in another world” than the more visceral racing type stuff. I did love some vehicle based games like Ultrawings, but most of my time was in Skyrim and No Man’s Sky.
However, I have recently been on a racing game kick. I skip over the management and tuning stuff to just get to the driving because that’s what I’m looking for. Having a sim rig like yours that adds physical sensations to VR driving sounds pretty sweet. Maybe in another year or two when it’s time for me to get the hot new headset and dive back in to VR, I’ll have to think about the racing sim setup.
Btw I used a Samsung Odyssey, which is WMR, but via Steam VR. Had very good experiences. The displays seemed great for the time.
I also love calculator watches what a coincidence