When people my age were in school, the word processor consisted of 1) a pencil and 2) a piece of paper. Just like today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s computers and calculators, our tools of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50s also had an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enter\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153delete\u00e2\u20ac\u009d function. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re called lead and erasers.<\/p>\n
When my sister, Bingy, and I were at Immaculate Conception School, we often shared a teacher, Sister Mary Matematica Primera, who dreamed nightly about the amount of arithmetic homework she was about to pile on.<\/p>\n
Bingy and I had an advantage: We had a 50-some-year-old calculator we called T\u00c3\u00ado Juan, who could perform dazzling mental computations. His forte was in multiplying or dividing two digits by two digits. Anything larger took a bit longer.<\/p>\n
Once, in front of some visiting I.C. schoolmates, Bingy set up T\u00c3\u00ado Juan to perform an arithmetic show-and-tell. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d recite a host of equations for our uncle to solve. To the amazement of her classmates, Louise, Isabel, Agnes, Mary Rose and Joan, our uncle provided answers almost as quickly as he received them.<\/p>\n
As the grand finale, my sister set out to astound her friends with an Einsteinian question: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Uncle, what is a million (dramatic pause) and one?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Expecting to begin smelling sizzling cranial tissue, Bingy was instead surprised and a wee bit embarrassed with his answer: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u2122A million and 1\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is a million and 1.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
The obviousness of the answer cracked me up (but I too expected a complicated answer. Yet I played along, as if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d known the answer all along. Now if Bingy had asked Juan to subtract 1 from 1,000,000 there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have been a more seemingly complicated answer.<\/p>\n
By acting as if I knew the answer already, I played a common game: We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know the answer, but once the answer is revealed, we pretend we knew it all along.<\/p>\n
The hand-held computers with No. 2 lead, that people used eventually morphed into more sophisticated things. My first summer at the University of Missouri I became somewhat familiar with the calculator. The one I checked out actually required an extra step. Instead of merely punching in 1+1=2, we needed to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153confirm\u00e2\u20ac\u009d each entry, So instead of only pressing a key, we needed to follow that with a yes-I-mean-it function.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d heard the Missouri Student Union had some of the then-new LED calculators, available for checkout, but I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realize that this university of 40,000 students had all of 10 such devices and the terms were more than the usual arm-and-a-leg; instead, we had to surrender our student I.D. card, which we needed for meals, access to the library, etc. And the students who managed to score on a calculator for a day, often spent hours on mindless computations that had nothing to do with their studies.<\/p>\n
Did elementary school teachers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 rules about no calculators in class actually help students figure things out on their own? Has the reverse been true? Did the requirement that students have such a tool augment their learning?<\/p>\n
I believe that whatever calculators did, they failed to teach people the simple act of making change. Although somewhat of a mathematical misfit myself, at least I do know how to make change. I can often determine how much change I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be receiving, without having to write it down or punch it in. Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that what we learned in grade school?<\/p>\n
Recently I read on Facebook about how people in sales often struggle making change. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like clutter in my billfold and try to divest myself of the smaller denominations first. For example, at a restaurant, if the tab is, say, $11.65, I will often plunk down a twenty and two singles, in order to get back ten plus change.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking: Hold on to your singles. But quite often I get back the same singles I handed over and wait for the receptionist to tediously count out the rest of the change. When I try to help out by telling the person, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You owe me $10.35,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I usually get a you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re-trying-to-cheat-me-glare.<\/p>\n
Another time, we went to a popular restaurant in town that had a discount of one percent per year for the birthday honoree. Our youngest, Ben, had just turned 16, so, after he blew out the candles, we expected his portion of the bill to be discounted from the five or six dollars his meal cost.<\/p>\n
Well, we weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t prepared for the hand wringing that followed. The waitperson struggled with her tiny calculator and determined that we were entitled to a discount of 16 cents \u00e2\u20ac\u201d on a bill that totaled 30 or 40 dollars. There was no time to present a math lesson, and T\u00c3\u00ado Juan wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t around to explain exactly what the discount would have been, so we paid what the receptionist said we owed. And her tone was such that she must have expected us to be grateful. And to tip her extra.<\/p>\n
Finally, once, in around 1996, my family was returning from a trip east. We began with a convoy of two cars, but Ben returned with a gift from a relative, a well-worn VW Rabbit. We stopped at a convenience store in Fort Sumner to gas up all three cars. Those purchases cost us about 44 dollars. As I pulled out a fifty and went in to pay, one of my sons said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dad, the sign says they won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take anything larger than a 20.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nonsense,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I answered. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153On a purchase this large, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll have to accept it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My logic was that the change we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d receive would be proportionately the same as a 14-dollar purchase when handing over a twenty.<\/p>\n
Diego insisted he was right, saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not going to accept your 50. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll bet you a dollar on it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Challenge accepted.
\nOh well, I had an extra dollar anyway and Diego said he could use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When people my age were in school, the word processor consisted of 1) a pencil and 2) a piece of paper. Just like today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s computers and calculators, our tools of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50s also had an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enter\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153delete\u00e2\u20ac\u009d function. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re called lead and erasers. When my sister, Bingy, and I were at Immaculate Conception […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1408,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1407\/revisions\/1408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}