We will be out of a job!!!

Not really. But that sound you just heard was the tectonic plates of math education starting to shift again, just as they started to shift about fourteen years ago. The November, 2002 focus issue of the Mathematics Teacher regarding computer algebra systems (also known as calculators which do everything), an issue that is accessible to NCTM members here , was an eye opener.

Recall teaching your first class full of TI-81 calculators: The students, remedial or advanced, were tremendously excited at the prospect of having the grapher and the visual aid of typing in numbers that could be edited easily. In the same way, it easy to tell in an abstract sense how the CAS will excite students. They will still need to do a lot of algebra themselves, but the CAS can check their work thoroughly, and they can learn from the CAS how fixing line 2 affects lines 3, 4, and 5, without their having to redo all the work themselves. The CAS can give instant feedback to a student who is struggling with almost any algebra problem! And this feedback comes without the usual judgmental statements! ("If you had been paying attention instead of talking to Billy . . . ")

It will take a lot of political persuasion for schools to permit the use of CAS's in the classroom and at home. None of today's parents learned math with a graphing calculator, and the vast majority of college professors did not, either. These two influential groups of people are mostly not used to technology they can place in their lunch box. Perhaps an enterprising textbook author will write the first CAS-active textbook, and the revolution will be underway. As John Mahoney writes in his article for this issue of MT, "I can't wait."