Some Relief For Cluster Consternation
What’s stopping clusters from being useful tools?
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
My daughter started school the other day. She came home and said the teacher recommended that students get a graphing calculator. Mind you, it wasn’t the hundred bucks for the calculator that prompted me to grab a pencil and paper and say, “Back in my day, this was our graphing calculator. No batteries needed. And can even keep the stylus on your ear.” Instead it was the idea that the mastery of pencil and paper was becoming a lost art. After all, if you’re on a desert island and need to plot a parabola, where are you going to find a graphing calculator?
At that point, my wife joined the conversation and mentioned that my daughter’s teacher probably used a graphing calculator in high school and college as well. Sigh. Nothing like feeling old. When I was in my college years, there were classes devoted to learning how to plot equations on these large, toggle-switch laden things called minicomputers. The art has improved a bit since then and graphing calculators are but one example. In my daughters school, graphing calculators are used to teach subjects — they’re not a subject per se. If I don my analogy hat on for a moment, I think back to the day, with all of the associated consternation, minicomputers let me do better math and science.
