My Love Affair with My Calculator

I developed a love of my calculator from Mr. Nagel, the most demanding, nerdy, hardworking, intelligent, calculator-loving math teacher of all time. He could hear a calculator fall to the ground a mile away and send his evil glare across space accordingly. (I often wondered if he had figured out a mathematical formula for that space traveling phenomenon.) He believed (rightfully so) that calculators were beautiful instruments because it could do advanced math problems in a few seconds. The same advanced math problems that he had to cut down trees to solve in college. However, he always emphasized that a calculator was only a tool to be used and you had to know why the problems worked as well.

This was all fine and dandy for me until I hit senior math: pre-calculus. Or perhaps a more apt description was that it hit me. I could crunch the numbers and figure out derivatives and probability and compounding interest and the wonders of the sine and cosine curves, but something was missing: I never understood the why behind it. Why would anyone want to divide by zero? Isn't that the cardinal rule of math? NEVER DIVIDE BY ZERO.

But I could crunch the numbers and go through the processes well enough to earn an A in the gradebook, so I decided I didn't need to know everything (which was a major concession for me).

Not understanding the why of derivatives, I took NDSU's math placement exam and was told by a lovely computer-generated printout to sign up for Calculus I or Applied Calculus. My English advisor had no experience with the math classes and told me to choose. My thought process went a little like this: Applied Math is the dumb math of high school; thus it must be the dumb math of college. My sister took Calculus; thus I can take Calculus.

I stayed in Calculus for three days. Several contributing factors: a quiz on the first day that contained a combination of numbers and symbols that I didn't even know could be put together; the professor commented that we had an English major in the class and that would be refreshing among engineers and maybe word people liked numbers too; I discovered pharmacy students only had to take Applied Calculus, and pharmacists aren't dumb; and the one that takes the cake: Calculus did not allow calculators.

So I took Applied Calculus and lovingly took my calculator. And somehow everything that I had gone through the motions of as a senior in high school actually made sense. I understood the why.

Two semesters later I forgot, and I am continuing to forget. So I lovingly gifted my calculator, that intricate mechanism of joy, to my brother. He let that TI89 slip off his desk into the graveyard of calculators. I hope he had to endure the wrath of Mr. Nagel's calculator-on-the-floor glare to the 100th degree, and I hope he figured out the formula for that awe-inspiring glare for I'd like to recreate it.