I always thought this was a bad argument anyway. The point of learning arithmetic was to develop your ability to reason and to learn study skills and habits. A similar argument could be you won't always have a car so you'd better learn to run. But I don't run because I'm worried I won't have transportation. I run/hike to stay fit.

Exacty. A calculator is useless if you don’t know how to structure the problem and what and how to calculate it.

Teaching kids to do math without calculators is like teaching people to do carpentry without a measuring tape. It’s slower and less accurate for no real benefit. Before we had calculators, everyone used an abacus or a slide rule. Calculation aids have always been an integral part of math, and knowing how to properly apply them makes you better at math (faster, more accurate, deeper understanding). We literally developed computers in the first place so we could do less mental math because it is so unreliable.

Why does the logic of technology/industry fall apart for calculators? I’ve never understood it. There’s no other field where we perceive “lack of tool use” to be an advantage.

EDIT: It would be like practicing fingerpainting in art class because "you won't always have a brush in your pocket" Hell, why even learn to read when you won't always have a book in your pocket? Better not play basketball in gym class, you won't always have a ball in your pocket! It's just always been a totally goofy attitude. I didn't accept this illogical take as a child and I sure don't accept it now 😂

I have specific memories of multiple math teachers telling me this from elementary school through high school, in the 90’s and early 00’s. Then I got to college and it was all “how good are you at making computers do all the math for you?” AKA computer science

So why would they have said such a thing to you?

That’s a great fucking question! Nevertheless, it happened.

I love the Mandela effect, or as I like to call it, “white people don’t pay attention to African politics and then made up a whole thing to explain why they thought Nelson Mandela was dead.”

Mechanical calculators have been around since the 1700’s and widespread since the 1920’s, though. And before that we had the abacus and slide rule. Mental math has never been a flex, lol

They’re huge, but the calculators are the only thing they sell to consumers. Mostly they make wholesale components for other companies IIRC

I have specific memories of multiple math teachers telling me this from elementary school through high school

...and I have specific memories of the Fruit of the Loom stuff we were wearing at school featuring a cornucopia...

Memories are not static and unswayable.

And with some cognitive social feedback the memory transformation from "You will not be able to use calculators in every situation" to the common-identity-establishing "You will not have calculators in your pockets all the time" is a minor one.

That's exactly the point I am trying to make.
It is a classical candidate for Mandela Effect in action, but other than the sweatshirt logo probably not possible to prove one or the other way, although I have the feeling evidence points somewhat in the direction of a likely "false" memory.

Nevertheless, it happened.

Yes! And my Fruit of the Loom sweatshirts did have a cornucopia on it!

;-)

Hey, before you go start gaslighting strangers that their memories are false (I also remember hearing the phrase in school in the 80s), consider a few things:

First, while calculator watches may have existed, I don't remember seeing them in my childhood. They weren't universal.

Second, teachers are adults, kinda set in their ways. Brand-new 'toys' aren't going to change their thinking on a dime. I can very easily believe teachers continuing to use the phrase even after circumstances have changed (see also the other poster mentioning hearing it in the 00s).

Third, the fact that you can "prove" the saying wrong with your arguments doesn't mean that all of our teachers have thought it through the way you did (and I think all of us have had teachers where the response to this debate would be "Quit talking back! Detention for you, buster!" instead of "Oh, yeah, interesting thought...").

Well, tbf, the fact that they even knew the name "Nelson Mandela" indicates that they paid more attention to it than to basically everything else happening in Africa...

I never said I could "prove" anything, only that I wonder if it might be a likely product of the Mandela Effect given the circumstances.

I find the whole idea intriguing, and entirely not a bad thing in any way!

On the contrary:
Instead of something impressed on you from outside, it might be an entity-establishing tale a whole generation developed in a collective, subconscious way on their own, a strong joint image to mark their distinctiveness from the previous generation.

If anything, I am jealous because I am not sharing that common experience!

But, hey, at least I still have the "Fruit of the Loom" false memory. Not quite as cool and meaningful as your potential one, but fascinating nonetheless!

I was not dreaming about using numpy on the phone for doing compound interest calculations....

My generation was probably one of the last to have math teachers.

I come from a time when calculators were being used in high school and I have an older brother where they actually used slide rules. It was when the TI's came out and the school was 100% not ready for those.

I mean finger painting is taught to just know how to do it that way. There is merit to knowing how to do things with limited tools available. The basketball analogy falls flat though. that one is like doing math without numbers.

Especially for ascii Mario!

I don't know what kind of jackass clown schools you folks went to, but we were consistently told we would have calculators. It's just were required to understand the theory in full before using a solver.

We were being told that many, many years before you were born, kiddo.

Yes, use all the tools we have but still learn math, science and critical thinking. Use best tool for the job and how to use it right.

I never heard that one. No one gave a crap about computers at all.

I work in IT. Our apprentice students were complaining the other day about learning subnets the binary way. I laughed and told them, we all learn the concept. Then when we’re old and lazy we learn to spot the popular ones /32 /29 /24 /16 etc. For everything else there’s a subnet calculator

No, I started time and my social insurance number is zero. I am the total authority on all matters relating to reminiscence.

Did yours hate kids as much as mine did?

I did a little bit of homework on an old mobile phone (had downtime). How hard could it be? It was bad.

I grew up thinking I was horrible at math... till it became abtract enough that calculations were rare...

Turns out my handwriting is shit, and I cant manually calculate for my life. But if those two things are not a factor, I am really got at math.

Also. I had a "computational methods" class in uni, where we had to do algorithms with a calculator.... almost failed. Then went out off of that field and became a programmer. Im fairly sure if that class was actually computer base I'd gotten a perfect score.

Specifically my math teacher, 10th grade, yes. Huge miserable prick.

I remember being told it, and my memory is freaky good. I think the assumption that it's the Mandela Effect is pretty weak here. This isn't documented in the same way as the death of a famous figure, or a brand logo, or a book series. You don't have the counter evidence, and your argument assumes that teachers are perfectly knowledgeable and rational.

The era I'm referring to is mostly the '90s, and a bit of the early 2000s. The first iPhone, and the normalization of actual screens, was the late '00s. Even flip phones with basic screens didn't become common until the mid '00s. The technology you're talking about definitely existed, but wasn't that common. Cell phone technology, and adoption, really skyrocketed from 2000-10.

And teachers say nonsense all the time. I have a distinct memory of second grade, learning about the prime meridian and equator, and that if you cut the Earth along either one you got halves called "hemispheres". I asked what you get if you cut along both the prime meridian and the equator, and my teacher said "Well, you get a broken globe", and then continued on.

Teachers are just people. They don't predict technological trends, they say things based on their past knowledge to get kids to engage with the material. Assuming you've never tried to teach children things for an extended period of time, it results in saying a lot of stuff that's more rhetorical than factual.