Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments
Graphing calculators are entirely unnecessary for learning high school/college mathematics/physics/etc. (though they might be useful for engineering students working on-site where access to a full computer is impractical – I don't have such experience with that, so can’t comment).<p>There is no good pedagogical reason for assigning problems to students which use numbers that can’t be worked out easily on paper or with a regular scientific calculator. Forcing students to expend effort on keeping track of many-digit numbers is in general an unnecessary mental load which distracts from the concepts being taught. Including "how to use your calculator" sections as part of mathematics instruction, and assigning "calculator problems" which include e.g. unreasonably complex symbolic integration problems or unreasonably precise numbers, for the sake of giving students practice with a graphing calculator interface is a waste of teacher and student effort.<p>Additionally, Because Texas Instruments has so effectively lobbied textbook authors and test writers and school administrations to get their calculators on the list of approved/official devices, many students are prompted to spend an unreasonable amount of money on calculators which they do not need. It’s something like a tax on those students.<p>TI graphing calculators have awful, obtuse interfaces. Their programming and debugging tools are rudimentary and outdated. Their graphics capabilities are limited, and graphics made with them can’t be used for any other purpose or easily shared. Students would be much better served by lessons/mentoring on the use of regular general-purpose computers and programming languages, whether for mathematics or whatever else. If they need symbolic integration or graphing capabilities for solving some concrete engineering problem, or for exploring, they would be much better served by a tool such as Mathematica or Maple [or heck, Python] than by a TI calculator. Full computers are much better for inputting and interacting with data and mathematical structures.<p>It's been 9 years since I was in high school. But on principle, I never bought a graphing calculator, and I never found it to be any disadvantage in any course I encountered in high school or college [except, briefly, on the AP Calculus test, where I had to familiarize myself with the TI83's awful UI on a borrowed calculator during the test; it didn’t end up hurting my score]. However, I found programming in Maple, and later Python, to be invaluable in solving all sorts of problems.