Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO) members are hoping to place their Selbyville Middle School seventh-graders ahead of the curve and raised the rallying cry last week: More graphing calculators, please!
Arguably, calculators make a poor cause célèbre. They’re a rather workaday item, not as compelling as blue whales or giant sequoias. But they’re probably more important to local students, especially students in the “honors” section.
These kids are starting young, but they’ll need these skills ingrained if they want to carry an option into technical fields for later in life. And their counterparts, in eighth grade, start the year using the Texas Instruments TI-83s.
The calculators are larger and more powerful than the standard scientific calculator – they’re really more like handheld computers with a math specialty. Students can use them to store equations, plot and display graphs, even graph and scroll through table values side-by-side, on a split screen.
There’s a separate “TI Graph Link” software plus cable that can be used to hook the calculators directly into a computer. So, using a computer hooked to a projector, these students can now cast their math problems onto the board simply by bringing their calculators to the front of the room.
(Probably still embarrassing if they’ve made a mistake, but at least there’s no chalk dust to contend with.)
Seventh-grade honors math teacher Lori Hudson suggested her students were missing out a little because the school wasn’t providing them with the TI-83s.
“We use a set of several books, aligned toward the (Delaware State Testing Program, DSTP), and they encourage hands-on applications,” she said. “So each book has a section where we apply the skills we’ve learned.
“But because the seventh-graders don’t have them (the TI-83s), we ultimately cut the entire “Investigations” section out of each book,” Hudson pointed out.
Selbyville Middle School does provide graphing calculators for the eighth-grade honors students, and since they did, Hudson said those students were using them on a daily basis. “We don’t have them, so we don’t use them,” she noted.
While she admitted it might be possible to swap them back and forth between the seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms, Hudson said that would take some serious coordination, and would likely prove cumbersome.
However, after asking Principal Mike Kline if there might be any leftover funding for Hudson’s (and colleague Neil Barch’s) classrooms. Kline said it was on the list and had been on the list, she reported, but no dice.
Which brought the topic to last week’s PTO meeting, when Hudson promoted the calculators as beneficial on several counts. The extra functions make them more applicable to the math program laid out in the books they are using, she said, and the use of those functions develops “higher order thinking skills,” relating math more closely to situations the students would encounter in real life.
“And if we can teach them how to use these calculators now, they’ll be that much more familiar by eighth grade,” Hudson added.
Presently, teachers spend a couple weeks at the beginning of the year going over the extra functions on the graphing calculators. Hudson voted to get that out of the way one year early.
PTO member Michele Steffens said the school would need about $6,000 to purchase enough calculators for both seventh-grade honors classes (approximately 60 students).
“They’d stay at the school, so the kids coming up would still get some use out of them,” she noted.
According to Steffens, Selbyville Middle School students had managed to notch the highest math testing scores in the state last cycle (not counting charter and private schools) and she wants to keep the support coming for that program.
She said she plans to petition local businesses for donations, to help further the education of Selbyville Middle School’s “upcoming entrepreneurs.”
Steffens asked anyone willing to give to send a check to the “SMS PTO Calculator Fund,” care of Michele Steffens, Rd. 1, Box 353B, Ocean View, DE 19970. For more information, contact the Steffens at (302) 537-2310.