Hopefully they get to the of the problem

i see what you did there

Hehehehe, nice one.

Why do they let them use calculators?

You don't need a calculator to solve 3x²-11x+7=0.

my ti89 just gave me:
x=-(37^.5-11)/6 or (37^.5+11)/6

If it has a power button, just raise it to the 0.5 power. Easy.

8008135

BRILLIANT.
This is the best headline I've seen in a while.
You get a cookie.

/for those slower than most (this IS fark), root is missing.

x^.5

Root. Is it root? It's root, right?

Vertdang: /for those slower than most

Hey! I,uh...

GungFu: 8008135

Made me think of this:

Subby forgot a word! Hahahahah!

Is there a calculator for poetry?

LordOfThePings: Subby forgot a word! Hahahahah!

....

+ subby^(1/2)

I was one of those kids who was forced to use the TI-81 all through high school and university. Then I went to Navy Nuclear Power School: no graphing calculators allowed, TI-30 the most powerful you can use. Learned more math using that than any fancy-schmancy graphing calculator.

/now I'm an HP 10bII kinda guy.

"We leave it up to the schools' and the districts' professional judgment,"

Time to hire a new bunch of professionals and not your cousins.

Meet Us at the Stick: Why do they let them use calculators?

You don't need a calculator to solve 3x2-11x+7=0.

Just remember the Sesame Street theme song:


Negative b
plus or minus the
square root of
4 a c
all over 2 a
/

I forgot the "b squared" in my little diddy, but you get the idea.

He didnt need it, root 37 is clearly just a bit over root 36, which is 6, so check the multiple choice list for 6.1 ish.

So the test was basically testing financial ability of the parents/teachers? That does seem a bit unfair.

I must be old or something. We were not allowed to use calculators in school. When I took drafting we were issued slide rules.

/Now get off my lawn unless you plan on mowing it

FTA: But Dutch wonders whether the test can be fair across the state, if not every district has the same procedure with calculators or uses the same equipment.

"This is a test that they are saying is 'high-stakes,' " she said. "If they are not administering these in a fair and equitable way at the schools, should it be 'high-stakes?' "

No Child Left Behind negatively impacts economically disadvantaged schools, sort of like a self-fulfilling prophesy. We should be helping those schools not closing them.

/Bushwinned?

So what is the farking problem?????

The article says that the student in question is an A and B student. And that she figured out a different way to calculate the square root.
You mean like many of us had to as students, with......math?
You mean she might actually have a better understanding of math as a science, not just a button on a calculator?
Damn schools are failing miserably, again!

I use a TI-89 Titanium to generate the Taylor series of the square root function with a center near the square root I'm trying to calculate, so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.

That said, I also have a $1 calculator from Wal*mart with a square root button, so she should go...thanks mom...

I saw the other day casio has a $20 calculator that can calculate definate integrals...it's not symbolic, but for all those practical applications of integrals, I'm sure it's good enough.

Give up your friday night pizza delivery for frozen.
Give up your big screen TV for a 10" TV.
heck, for $1, don't buy oreos for a week or make the tacos without sour cream this week...

Egon Spengler: No Child Left Behind negatively impacts economically disadvantaged schools, sort of like a self-fulfilling prophesy. We should be helping those schools not closing them.

Math is different for a rich school?

Jim_in_Erie_CO:

This.

Sounds like she certainly reached understanding... maybe even comprehension. Good on her and her teacher.

FTA: "This is a test that they are saying is 'high-stakes,' " she said.

High-stakes? TFA talks about a standardized test - Those (not counting the SAT) generally don't affect the individual students, but the schools.

I learned that around 4th grade, and started drawing patterns in the answer boxes after that. Still got into my first-choice college.

Well, it's not that hard to estimate a root, and then square the number and see how close you are. Sure, it takes a few extra seconds, but I'm sure the exam didn't contain 500 square root problems.

i.e. square root of 700...well you know 25x25 is 625, so try 26x26...27x27. Ok, so it's about 26.5x26.5. I'm sure this would be close enough to give you the correct answer on a multiple choice exam.

Laughs...



How do you like 'dem apples?

Kids today and their fancy automatic arithmetic engines.

Seriously, though, when I took the ACT I wasn't allowed to use the calculator I brought because it was uncle's old graphic calculator with the memory function. It's really amazing how little you actually need a calculator on that test. I think there were two problems that I couldn't do because I didn't have a sin or tan button, but the rest were easily solvable using scratch paper alone. And I'm a frigging English major, so it's not like I'm likely to throw the curve on any math test.

Did the quadratic formula explode?

What's a calculator??? Back when I went to school, I saw one once. It was about half the size of a brick, came with an ac adapter, and had little itty bitty red numbers that had to have a special lense on each number to magnify it.

//Now...GET OFF MAH LAHN!!

TheBigBradWolf:
That said, I also have a $1 calculator from Wal*mart with a square root button, so she should go...thanks mom...

I'm glad you've got that super-duper calculator. Now invest in improving your reading abilities. That calculators were ISSUED by the SCHOOL to the students specifically for the WASL test.

Don't they teach interpolation by Sophmore year?

Take a guess, multiply it by itself. Adjust your guess according to whether it's too high or low; repeat.

Of course, my old-fashioned algebra teacher thought we also needed to know how to extract square roots with just pencil and paper and showed us that, too.

The_Wilde_Yoh: Did the quadratic formula explode?

computer over
virus = very yes.

LittleSmitty: I must be old or something. We were not allowed to use calculators in school.

THIS!

I mean, what the hell!? They don't teach how to work out a square root on paper in that school? What's the point of a math test if they're allowed to use a calculator at all?

Smellvin:
Just remember the Sesame Street theme song:


Negative b
plus or minus the
square root of
4 a c
all over 2 a
/

Sesame Street? We sang it to the tune of Pop Goes The Weasel.

Ow My Balls: Is there a calculator for poetry?

To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.

I was told th....., nevermind.

Lots of people in here are getting on the mom about the girl not having a better calculator... Maybe the article didn't say and I'm just remembering from back in school but they are assigned by the school, not brought in by the student... it's not the kids or the moms fault that she had a crappy calculator, Even if she had a better calculator she wouldn't be allowed to use it. They would call that cheating.

eltejon: Jim_in_Erie_CO:

This.

Sounds like she certainly reached understanding... maybe even comprehension. Good on her and her teacher.

Thou shalt not mention the secrets of Bloom and his Taxonomy before the unwashed.

Heehee - my dad gave me his old HP (I forget the model) when I was in 10th grade, after I asked him for the new TI. He failed, however, to mention anything about reverse polish notation, which I discovered the next day in class when the damn thing wouldn't stop beeping every time I tried to add :).

Of course, as I'm sure he figured, I ended up loving it and used it constantly, although I never got over the suspicion that its capacity was a million times greater than I was making use of. I think it was toying with me. I'm almost certain.

/also, would read again subby!

Jedoc: when I took the ACT I wasn't allowed to use the calculator I brought because it was uncle's old graphic calculator with the memory function.

There is no such thing as an "ACT I"

LT L: + subby^(1/2)

I was one of those kids who was forced to use the TI-81 all through high school and university. Then I went to Navy Nuclear Power School: no graphing calculators allowed, TI-30 the most powerful you can use. Learned more math using that than any fancy-schmancy graphing calculator.

/now I'm an HP 10bII kinda guy.

I learned to use a slide-rule in engineering undergrad. Not because I had to, but because I'm a nerd. It made me appreciate my old HP RPN.

Finding roots on a standard calculator is not exactly rocket science. Approximate root in your head, multiply it by itself in the calculator, check, new guess, repeat, bracket. Doesn't even take that long:

sqrt(31415)
approximate 200^2 = 40000
approximate 150^2 = 22500
approximate 180^2 = 32400
approx 175^2 = 30625
approx 177^2 = 31329

There you go, about 20 seconds and I have the square root within 0.5%. Point here is, these kids should take what they're given and make proper use of it. It's not like they have to substitute multiple addition operations for multiplication or something, this is relatively non-work-intensive.

pla: FTA: "This is a test that they are saying is 'high-stakes,' " she said.

High-stakes? TFA talks about a standardized test - Those (not counting the SAT) generally don't affect the individual students, but the schools.

I learned that around 4th grade, and started drawing patterns in the answer boxes after that. Still got into my first-choice college.

From my understanding some school districts are making the WASL have an impact on graduation... so if that's acurate then it does affect the students.

/Didn't look to see if anyone else already said it.

Why is this mother raising a stink about the calculator, anyway? Her kid's bright enough to figure out square roots without one, just like in the old days.

Okay, I think I'm missing something here. Isn't the point of standardized testing to make sure the kids actually learned something? How are you supposed to learn math with a calculator? They may as well have made the whole thing an open book test or put the farking answer key up on the board.

FelineMommy27: Okay, I think I'm missing something here. Isn't the point of standardized testing to make sure the kids actually learned something? How are you supposed to learn math with a calculator? They may as well have made the whole thing an open book test or put the farking answer key up on the board.

A calculator is just a machine, the user has to tell it what to do.


Obviously testing when the kids have calculators shouldn't be mere arithmetic.

FelineMommy27: How are you supposed to learn math with a calculator?

You know, there is more to math than being able to do arithmetic in your head.