The day I got my first calculator -...
teacher: All right, children, welcome to fourth grade math. Everybody take a calculator out of the bin.
me: What are these?
teacher: From now on we’ll be using calculators.
me: What do these things do?
teacher: Simple operations, like multiplication and division.
me: You mean this device just . . . does them? By itself?
teacher: Yes. You enter in the problem and press equal.
me: You . . . you knew about this machine all along, didn’t you? This whole time, while we were going through this . . . this charade with the pencils and the line paper and the stupid multiplication tables! . . . I’m sorry for shouting . . . It’s just . . . I’m a little blown away.
teacher: Okay, everyone, today we’re going to go over some word problems.
me: What the hell else do you have back there? A magical pen that writes book reports by itself? Some kind of automatic social studies worksheet that . . . that fills itself out? What the hell is going on?
teacher: If a farmer farms five acres of land a day—
me: So that’s it, then. The past three years have been a total farce. All this time I’ve been thinking, “Well, this is pretty hard and frustrating but I guess these are useful skills to have.” Meanwhile, there was a whole bin of these things in your desk. We could have jumped straight to graphing. Unless, of course, there’s some kind of graphing calculator!
teacher: There is. You get one in ninth grade.
me: Is this . . . Am I on TV? Is this a prank show?
teacher: No.
Jan 8th