You waited until the last minute...

[Selkiedreams]

i 'had' to buy a graphing calculator, i bought 12 dollar version that did what i needed and my computer
oh and to show how i hate that thing even at that price when i took algerbra and we used the graphing calculators i made mine say hello and did it all by hand
Oh and one more point what about us kids who if they can really work it out, see the math work in parts and take time on it?
I dont test well, i ace it when i have the time and my IQ is high but when i have to only use a calculator its hard for me (only one sheet of scratch paper allowed is not fair!!!) ...

Actually they /were/ manditory in all three years of math in my high school. if you didn't get one the school called your house and spoke to the parent about why you didn't have the proper tools for the class. it wasn't that i "had" to have one. actually i hate technology (i'm lucky my computer hasn't blown up on me yet) and i would have rather done everything by hand. and despite that i was never really good at math i hated using the thing. my teachers wouldn't teach us how to do the math without the calculator. and a computer doesn't help you when you're sitting in a 9th-11th grade classroom.

[dawnfire]

The graphing calculator is probably the worst investment ever and it's really stupid that schools make it mandatory. I remember when I was in high school they made us have them, I paid 95 dollars for a TI 82, then one of the functions was faulty and I had to go buy another one for another 95 dollars. They justified it by saying "they'll make you use it in college! all your math classes will make you use them" HA! funny... I never used one in college, in fact, they weren't even allowed in the room. grrrr lol. I still have both of them... anyone need a TI-82 or a TI-83?

I had to use that one in collage due to it having one particular calculus function but here's the killer we couldn't use it in exam time due to it being programmable (they didn't want people to program cheats on it)