On Sep 27, 2009, at 19:38 , Charles Cossé wrote:

Hi, this has probably been discussed to death already, but maybe not: The point at which fancy graphing calculators become "necessary" (ie as in one's student career) is the point at which the calculator should be abandoned and Python employed. Just a thought ... delete at will !

Just a month ago, a friend of mine who homeschools her children was asking me about graphing calculators. Apparently the math curriculum she uses has a number of graphic calculator exercises. My advice was to buy a nice solar-powered scientific calculator (for $15 at Target), but to ignore the graphing calculator entirely. Her kids should do the exercises by hand, on graph paper instead. Anything that is hard enough for you to use a graphic calculator can be done much more easily with a computer.

After giving her this advice (which I still stand by), I was thinking about my own experience. I was going through high school when the first graphic calculators came out, and I had one Junior and Senior year and through college. I loved to program it, and I loved the big screen where I could see and edit expressions. However, as I think about it, I can not think of a single problem where I *needed* the graphic calculator, or where it gave me more insight than I could do by hand. It was a fun toy, but not the best tool.