Is Calculator Bad for Grade school kids?

It is incredible how much standards in eduication has dropped. As a teacher I have seen more kids getting more lazy and more aggressive over the years then I really want to. I have a set of calculators in my class but they are rarely used. Far worse than calcualator use is having a parent defending their child's laziness. That, to me, far outways any bad teaching technique.

I feel mixed about this because when my oldest was in fifth grade his class started doing statistics. I thought that they should learn also how to use a graphing calculator because it would be good for them to know later in life. I asked the teacher if they were suppose to have/use a calculator, which she replied "no, they are not allowed to use calculators on the standardized testing."

When I was in college and took statistics I had never used a graphing calculator because in school we never did statistics and also my parents were like you and didn't let me use one. I really struggled at first using the calculator, and had to get a tutor to show me how all of the options and buttons worked.

So while a child is using basic math I see no need for one but as math becomes more advanced they should at least learn how to do it on a calculator so they at least have the skills when they need them in life.

Calculators are for high graders and high schools. During early stages of studying students need to exercise their brains and get it ready to function properly for their life ahead. If they start using calculator in their lower grades than imagine the situation. They would not be able to calculate the smallest problem within their brain in the future and they will always be depending on their calculators.

Each coin has two siades. for one thing, it helps your kid do his homework more essily.if other kids are allowed to use it,you should let him follow suitso that this can be fair.on the other hand,it does do harm to kid's memory and the mathematical ability.I am not so fond of this when I was in primary school. at that time, I thought it was a kind of cheating.

I think that at primary school children should not be using calculators. They should have the capacity to do all the maths that they need to in their heads and on paper up until then. When it gets to the point of highschool and the child obviously can do all of the maths up until then, then they can start using a calculator when they need to to save time.

I think kids should learn how to count without the calculator first. I never use a calculator for my mathematics assignments until I was in Junior high school, and that only for chemistry lesson. We never use calculator for mathematic here. Using calculator would not teach them the basics of math, which is important to understand.

calculator makes our life-computing easy, imagine the head turning difficulty of multiplying 9 digits to the power of 8 manually. lol. but providing calculator for grade schoolers can make them very dependent on this technology making the lazy in solving simple mathematics on their own. when i was young and in grade school our teachers did not allow us to bring a calculator with us, we do problem solving on our own.

Hi,
I am yet to become a parent . Yet;I feel that a too early exposure for kids to the calculator is not good. A Kid at such an early age would have a tendency to use the calculator even for simple additions,deductions,Multiplications etc.

In Higher classes or colleges;calculator use might be essential since we need to perform more complex or lengthy calculations .

Use at an early age: A strict no,no .


-Ptrikha1

Here where I live they allow the students now to use calcultors but I don't agree with it because I feel that it does affect their memory as far as them being able to remember how to do simple math problems. When my children ask me for a calculator I say to them that they should just write it out and they say that the teacher says for them to use the calculator. Oh, the good old days when we had long division and multiplication is gone.

I agree with you agihcam and I believe what you're doing is right and will help them. I'm only 20 and have no kids but in my elementary school they made us use calculators for basic math like addition and such and it has affected my math skills. I don't think kids use them because they are lazy,maybe some are but you have to put some blame on the school system as well. Many teachers are lazy. I remember in kindergarten, we had these huge blue calculators with white buttons and my teacher told us to figure out what 4 + 1 was on it. My mother was a single parent and struggled with two jobs so she was rarely home to teach us. Before I entered highschool I had to teach myself math because I was so bad at it they wanted to put me in special learning classes for math. Believe me, get them to learn it without a calculator because later in life it will hurt them like it did me. My elementary and jr. high school was on the worst list of schools because kids were being passed on yet couldn't read, write, or do math. We had kids in 8th grade writting at a 3 grade level. A lot of the schools in my area are very poor so that's why I'm going to college to get a good career so I can afford for my someday children to go to good schools and so that I can be home to help them learn as well.