This fall, Stephen Thompson began his first year of teaching Algebra 2 and college prep classes to 11th and 12th graders at a public high school in northwest Baltimore. On top of the typical stress of any first-year teaching experience, Thompson realized that along with other out-of-pocket classroom expenses, he would have to buy a pricey piece of classroom equipment: graphing calculators. Specifically, Texas Instruments graphing calculators.
“The students, for the most part, don't have calculators,” he told me in October. “On a typical day, a lot of students don't even have a pencil. It's up to the teacher to provide that stuff. The expectation is that we will have TI-83 calculators — that's just what the curriculum demands.”
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