When I graduated from Plainview High School (Plainvew Minnesota) in 1977, a friend's father gave me an electronic calculator to help with my college education. To put it in perspective, this was as big a deal at the time as giving me a high powered laptop would be today. This was back when the very first solid state wristwatches were being sold for $800. Personal computers had not even been considered yet.
My grandmother had been a teacher before her retirement, and she vehemently attacked the use of calculators as being a huge threat to education. In her well articulated opinion, calculators would prevent students from truly learning to perform and apply basic math operations. My grandmother was a very progressive person and a very clear thinker, so I took her warnings to heart. However, the calculator was just too cool to resist and so I used it vigorously in my various classes.
A couple of years later I was using a relatively simple (and cheap) calculator to balance my checkbook. Grandma looked at it and hesitantly asked how it worked. I showed her the simple keystrokes that made math a breeze. When she tried it and saw how easy it was, her face lit up and she said an enthusiastic "wow!" Then she spent the next hour or so adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing things as fast as she could go. She had a blast with that little calculator. I decided not to show her the memory functions because she was already sold and all the memory functions could do is mess her up. So we saved that topic for another day. Eventually she had to write an intermediate answer down to a complex calculation, and I showed her that the calculator had built in scratch paper known as memory. When she needed it then it was easy to learn and understand.
I was only about 19 when Grandma Gert became an enthusiastic calculator end user, but the lesson made a big impression on me. My career has involved the creation of robotics and process controllers, business software, educational software, on-line banking software, and a number of other innovations. In each case the new technology has drawn detractors, attackers and opponents. I've never viewed these folks as enemies because they remind me of my Grandmother all those years ago. They aren't evil, they are simply afraid and unsettled by a new technology with unknown consequences. The best solution is training- to give them the chance to get their hands on the technology and play with it. Once they get it they can't help but love it, once they feel safe with it.
© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved
Comments