Near the beginning of the year, my TI-83 vanished completely, about two days after my best friend lost his TI-84. Graphing calculators are not cheap, so both of us freaked and vowed not to tell our parents. I found an old but effective, scientific calculator while he borrowed his girlfriend's old calculator that just so happened to be a TI-84 like his missing one.
This is the third calculator that was of no use to me. My first one, the one that's in the visual with the poker chips, quit working. Don't ask me why, I don't know. It just stopped in the middle of the school year, leaving my sister to gift me with her TI-83 from college statistics. At the end of that school year (two years ago), my shiny TI-83 vanished amidst a bunch of boxes. This brought me to a very practical scientific calculator that was only about $15, but ridiculously helpful. I used this calculator straight through last year and started off this year with it. Somewhere between now and then, my TI-83 arose back to the surface, so I switched back to using it.
Then came along the week of Vanishing. I went back to using the old calculator. It worked, but we needed the graphing function for my math class. My mom finally caved and was a paycheck away from buying me a new calculator when I found mine again.
In the meantime, I had to take the PSAT, and for some reason, the room I was in couldn't use anything more than a standard calculator, even though the test book said we could use our own, and I had borrowed a graphing calculator from a friend who wasn't testing.
The calculators, meant to make my life easier, just made it more difficult.
I ended up doing most of the PSAT math in my head, using the calculator only for finding oddball things such as square roots and exponents. It was the biggest waste of my time to even have the calculator.
Moral of the story?
Just do the math in your head if you can help it.
Just do the math in your head if you can help it.
No comments:
Post a Comment