My post on May 16, 1999 titled " A Long Way from the Slide Rule "

SUNDAY, MAY 16, 1999 A Long Way from the Slide Rule ! While fossilized high school math teachers debate the wisdom of hand calculators in the classroom, their smart-ass pupils have no doubt all ready discovered a blissful shortcut for that tedious homework : on line calculators -hundreds of them ! What would have taken the sputnik generation hours to do, can now be done in minutes . For example, you can locate an " applet " that will instantly solve a quadratic equation for you,or given 3 sides of a triangle, compute the area according to the elegant Heron's Formula. Those on line graphers are just amazing for those of us who can still remember the slide rule. Remember how tedious it was to graph second and third degree equations ? Now just type in the equation and click ! A neat and beautiful graph appears before your eyes. There are amazing resources on the WWW even for the advanced calculus: instant " integration " and " differentiation ". " Now the kids don't even have to THINK ! " you might conclude. I think that it is a good thing that teachers will be denied the pleasure of instilling a permanent inferiority complex in MOST of their pupils. But -seriously - these homework aids actually FREE the mind for the more important matter of UNDERSTANDING concepts. I still recall that " the null set is a subset of all sets ". I owe my splendid success in life to that !