I wasn’t sure at first when my new job came with a class set of calculators. I worried that as soon as my students grabbed a calculator, they would stop thinking.
Around the same time, I was adding a certification in secondary math and revisiting my understanding of functions. It wasn’t until I started graphing with a graphing calculator that I began to understand transformations. The calculator allowed me to connect big ideas in mathematics to the symbolic representations I had memorized in high school.
That’s how I realized that what I needed to do was to teach my middle school students to use the calculator as a tool for thinking. In fact, when technology does the heavy lifting, it frees your mind up to play with and wonder about patterns and ideas.
Here is one of my favorite explorations!
Try finding these quotients:
1/11
1/101
1/1001
What happens? What if the numerator is 2, 3, 4 and so on . . .
What patterns do you find?