Calculator Caddy

Nice box, very functional, yet anyone who knows sees the through mortise and understands it is hand made.

Those might be old tech, but when I was in school they were expensive and you certainly wouldn’t allow them in the class. If they allowed calculators then we wouldn’t have learned the slide rule. I do wonder that at what point in history if ever the math teachers thought the slide rule cheating?

-- Mel

Nice box for some good calculators. I have lot of TI scientific calculators all over the house and love them. I’m from the last century!!

Nice build on the box—the dovetail joints make it stand out, too!!..............Jim

-- Jim Jakosh.....Practical Wood Products...........Learn something new every day!!

Thanks, guys!

I should have mentioned that the dividers have tenons, but I figured that would have been obvious. The tenons, if I remember correctly, we’re cut on the router table. I think I had the Wixey digital height gauge installed and this was the first test.

TI calculators are okay. It’s just that I’ve watched kids over the years get really lazy and undisciplined with them. The laziness comes in two ways…not using their brains to do simple calculations (especially with negative numbers) and not knowing how to graph functions on their own. Most of this laziness occurs before we ever get them in high school, so it’s hard to fix.

A lot of emphasis in Texas education is to teach them the calculator as a short-cut to pass our standardized tests. I even attended a mandatory workshop where the leader was advocating that kids no longer needed to factor because you can find zeroes of polynomials by using the calculator instead. Of course, two years later in calculus, the kids will be expected to factor when finding limits and derivatives using their definitions. It’s never the calculus that’s hard…it’s the algebra.

Rant ended.

-- jay, www.allaboutastro.com

Jay,

I started college calculus when those TI-85(92)s were all the craze. Spent more time fiddling with the damn things than I did learning the theorems. Bit me in the a$$ hard when I started doing 2nd-3rd year Calc / Diff Eqs.

-- Brian

The box looks super nice work.

-- W James Brokenbourgh Custom furniture maker http://artisticwoodstudio.com/

Nice job on the caddy, that is very nice.
I am with you, I cannot understand how they still get $130 bucks for them…

-- A thing of beauty is a joy forever...

Interesting – I graduated from high school in 1984, and I must have been part of those in-between years where none of us knew how to use a slide rule, and calculators weren’t allowed. Then, once in college, H-P got its RPN hooks into me, and I can’t use a TI any more.

-- My broker promised me he would treat my money as if it were his own. Trouble is, he did.

Yeah, I graduated high school in ‘87. We had scientific calculators, like my TI-35, which I still have. It’s solar power. Didn’t really need trig tables anymore, but that didn’t keep us from having to learn them.

My kids can’t understand why I teach unit circles and polar coordinates. Trig simply isn’t useful if you don’t understand WHY you are using it.

Thanks for the comments, folks!

-- jay, www.allaboutastro.com

When I graduated from HS we had slide rules!

-- Joe

Wow i love the bright yellow, those must have been custom made for the schools.

I was in college in the 90’s and have a TI-85 and I still use it to this day. I do have yet to find a smart phone app that I like as well as that TI-85. A few years back I bought a slide rule and learned how to use it because I figure if there is ever a solar storm bad enough to fry all the electronics it may come in handy to be on of the few engineering my age that knows how to use one.

Just love the comments about the calculators … When I was in High school, in the 60’s, we had pencils and erasers … and some of us nerds (we were called something different then) carried the slip stick on our belt like a sward.
I went back to school (I was 57) and the C.C. I attended used the TI-83. I still have and use every day, my TI-86, but to be honest I have 3 or 4 TI-36’s around the shop that do everything I use any more.
The TI-36 is about $15 and the TI-86 is about $135. And I will say this … I have done no graphing since I was in school.
Great box with nice craftsmanship. your organazational skills show through.

-- Grumpy old guy, and lookin' good Doin' it.

My first programmable calculator was an HP 35 that had magnetic memory sticks and cost about $500.00 if my memory is correct. It used Reverse Polish Notation instead of Algebraic Notation to enter data. Really liked that feature. Only calculator that I actually wore out.

-- Joe