Killer Kalculators

“Noooo….please I need that! I can’t do this without it!”

“Please…come on…I just need it a little longer.”

“You don’t understand! I have to have it. I get to use it other places…”

These may sound like statements you would expect to hear from drug addicts starting to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, but they are actually cries for help from students I tutor in math. No, my students are not drug users, far from it in fact. But they’ve been afflicted with a different type of addiction – an addiction to the all-powerful calculator. They rely on it for their every move, and even when they understand the concepts being taught, they are but one dead battery (or in the case of a solar-powered calculator a rainy day) away from failing.

The lack of basic math skills has deprived students of opportunities to excel in math. They become addicted to calculators like a drug user to meth. And yes, these addictions come complete with withdrawal symptoms. Many times have I had to pry the calculator out of a student’s hand, only to hear screams and pleadings, begging for the calculator to be returned.

For anyone reading this old enough to have grown up with log tables, slide rules, and having to calculate square roots by hand, this is not intended to send us back to the stone age of mathematics. Those are not computations that are overly useful in day-to-day living. However, when students can’t combine a single digit negative number and a single digit positive number, we’ve got a problem.

The assumption that by middle and high school students have learned addition, subtraction, multiplication and division blurs the reasons for their poor performance. When working with slope (rise over run) and a getting the reciprocal answer (i.e. 1/6 instead of 6), the student appears to not have mastered the concept because the most obvious mistake is doing using run over rise. However, a high school student who isn’t familiar with simplifying fractions could (and did) make the mistake that way. When it comes to finding the slope of a perpendicular line, a student would need to take the opposite reciprocal so when they come up with -1/2 instead of 2, the easiest explanation is that the student doesn’t know the formula. However, the students I’ve tutored often, with a little explanation, pick up the formula just fine. What they struggle with is the basic math.

The saddest part is that these students don’t realize their potential because of their lack of prerequisite skills. Last week, with a little help with the basic math parts, a girl I tutored was mastering concepts very well so I said to her, “Has anyone ever told you you’re actually pretty good at [math]?” and she looked at me and said “No.” And it’s not even completely the teacher’s fault – when you’re responsible for over one hundred and fifty students, its incredibly time consuming to check all of the work for all of the problems of all of the students to find the root causes. Seriously, who would have thought it was addition and subtraction that caused the kids to fail algebra and geometry? Anyone who saw my grade book when I was teaching knows I don’t support doling out unearned praise, but if kids are never encouraged when they do exceed expectations, its no surprise they think they can’t learn it.

Without the foundational skills, students are doomed to an academic life of frustration and failure in the classroom and a life of being scammed and hustled by pawn shops and payday loan companies once they “graduate.” Nobody wants students to be held back, but sometimes it is truly the best option.

Net time us discus civilization-ending chance of sell check. Yes, according to Microsoft Word, that sentence is error-free.