Calculator Addiction

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Calculators can become an intellectual drug.

You get stuck on 7 times 8, so you punch it in.

Instant relief!

And then the next time you get stuck, you reach for another hit without even trying to use your brain at all.

Soon reaching for that calculator becomes automatic.

You can’t do the arithmetic yourself.

The calculator owns you!

The more you use it for that simple stuff that you should be able to do in your head, that you really should have memorized, the harder it is to kick the habit and the more your basic foundational skills decay.

They just rot away.

So what started as a time saver ends up becoming this crutch that you just can’t function without.

This teaser is distilled from the following posts, if you want to dive deeper:

• If You Want to Learn Math, You Can’t Shy Away from Computation
• Cognitive Science of Learning: Developing Automaticity

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