I just read that the Texas State Board of Education is getting rid of calcuators in the elementary grades. It’s a good thing, too, because I’ve no doubt that every kindergarten through fifth grade teacher hands their students calculators so that these teachers can get out of doing what they love doing…teaching.

Honestly.

Although not approved yet, it’s only a matter of time. Because, as we all know, politicians know best. And, yes board members, you are politicians.

I remember my first year of teaching in 1987. I had a set of calculators in my classroom. I found them in the cupboard left by the teacher who’s room I had taken. One day in the teacher’s room during lunch I mentioned the calculators. The entire room turned and stared at me. Turns out, I had the only set of calculators the school owned and, unbeknownst by me, they had been looking for them for months. Considering where Texas is heading, I guess we were pretty lucky to have that one set.

I love calculators. They should not be removed from the classrooms. First of all, kids LOVE them and any good teacher knows that you don’t dismiss what kids love. You figure out how to weave it into your curriculum.

Here’s why I love calculators. They provide excellent opportunities to practice number sense and estimation skills…skills we adults use countless times during the day. Even board members.

Give this one a try: Enter the number 65. What is the fewest number of steps you can take to get the display from 65 to 35? Can you picture the kids doing the math in their heads to see if they can do it in one step?

Or how about: What two numbers under 20 multiply to get 255? What is the fewest number of tries you can do it in?

Priceless opportunities. And ones that good teachers will not be willing to give up.

When my oldest son was in preschool he asked me how many days there were in a year. Now, because he had an elementary math teacher as a mom, he was pretty savvy about things like adding and subtracting. He was also quite familiar with a calendar and knew there were 12 months in a year.

So, instead of telling him the answer, I asked him how he could use the calendar to figure it out. He quickly realized that if he added all the months together he would arrive at the answer.

“And how would you do that?” I asked.

He grabbed that awful cheating tool, the calculator, and proceeded to flip the calendar adding together the last number in each month. By the time he got to the end, his calculator read: 365.

“So how many days are there in a year?” I asked.

“365,” he replied.

And that was the end of that. He problem-solved his answer. He was four years old.

But here’s the thing. He didn’t know how to do double-digit addition. What he did know, though, was that he needed to perform addition in order to arrive at the answer. He understood the concept, not necessarily the specific skill needed. And, hey, as far as I’m concerned, the concept is the important part.

Here’s another example. I was teaching fourth grade and we were doing a math project where we were building a scale model town. One group of diehard football fans convinced me to let them build a stadium. After some consideration, I decided to allow them to do it using a different scale than the rest of the class. At one point they were trying to figure out how many people would be seated in each of the stadiums’ sections.

“How would you figure it out?” I asked.

“We need to divide but we don’t know how to divide large numbers.” We hadn’t gotten that far in the curriculum, yet.

But you know where this is going. “Use a calculator,” I replied. They did, and, like my oldest son, they got their answer.

Shame on those Texas board members who think that, given a set of calculators, teachers are going to have their students do their work through punching in numbers. Really, Texas? Really?