Classroom Project

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Nearly all of our special education and English language ac... " MORE

Nearly all of our special education and English language acquisition students come from financially challenged families. These families can barely afford the disposal basic calculators from the Dollar Store, let alone more capable scientific calculators which are required for our annual state assessments.

A scientific calculator has become a necessity in the modern Algebra, Geometry, and Pre-Calculus classroom, and the best way to ensure that students are prepared for advanced high school and college mathematics coursework is to integrate their use into the instruction as early as possible. In 9th grade Algebra, the students will use them to solve recursive patterns, to develop and solve quadratic equations, and to write equations and solve problems of probability and statistics.

Without this technology resource that most other schools take for granted, our students are falling further and further behind, because at this point their peers in other districts have been using them for years.

Because of the technology trickle-down effect, students have some amazing and very affordable options these days. While it is easy to spend several hundred dollars on a scientific or graphing calculator, there is one model that costs less than ten dollars (when ordered as a classroom set) and yet delivers 90% of the functionality and capability of the most advanced model.

Our teaching team has found that exposure to scientific calculators, even when all of the more advanced features are not being used, benefits our students in both general and specific ways. Using the calculator's basic functions helps to build self-confidence and to defeat math-phobia. As the students become more confident, they are empowered to tackle higher order and more complicated problems, as well as use their inherent creativity to discover new features and capabilities that they would otherwise never see. And specifically, their use will prepare the students for the annual state assessment, which assumes (wrongly) that all students are technologically savvy and competent.

Your help will make it possible to level the playing field and bring technology resources into the hands of the students who need it the most.

My students need 40 scientific calculators.