Advantages of Slide Rules, Calculators, and Mental Workouts

In answer to College Statistics In The 1970s

When I was in Educational Statistics class at Walla Walla in 1956, I aced the exams and got an A for the course because I was able to use a slide rule for the calculations. I think I was the only one who ever finished one of Dr. Bull's exams within the allotted time. Unfair advantage? Perhaps some might say so. But a slide rule was not expensive, and one could learn to do the basic processes in less than half an hour. Anyone else in the class could have done the same as I.

I bought one of the very first personal electronic calculators--a Sharp ELSI 8, a huge heavy four-banger with seven-segment neon display and a power converter almost as big as the calculator--paid about $350.00 for it, but got my money back many times over by making accurate calculations faster than my competition. Later I bought an HP 12C, which fits in my shirt pocket, runs forever on a tiny battery, handles a wide range of statistical, financial, and other tasks, and has more computing power than what took up a whole basement of a building, requiring many tons of air conditioning, when I was in college.

So I am no stranger to the usefulness of technology. But I still do approximations mentally before I go to the calculator. The early training my father gave me in mental arithmetic has stood me well through the years, and I have tried to pass the concepts on to my children and grandchildren. I think actually working the problems and coming to an answer mentally is better than leaning on a crutch, even on a very good electronic one. When I know the approximate answer in advance, I'm less likely to be misled by having inadvertently pushed the wrong button. That is a separate issue from having a sense of process in attacking real world situations. The student using a calculator to find the square root of 3 squared could have saved himself some embarrassment if he had been accustomed to doing his calculations mentally rather than going immediately to the electronic crutch.

And the mental work is good for the brain. We oldies have to take pro-active steps to keep the brain from going into atrophy. To that end I am now reading a Russian grammar. And when I do a crossword puzzle, I try to solve the entire thing mentally, working around from the outside edges toward the center, row by row, then to fill in the whole thing likewise without looking back at the clues. It does for the brain what a [BowFlex]Create? does for the abs.