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The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics encourages the use of calculators in the classroom as a teaching and learning tool, as well as a computational tool. This paper evaluates the impact on teachers' approaches to teaching mathematics and students' attitudes toward mathematics as the result of participation in an in-service program designed to help third and fourth-grade teachers incorporate calculators into their instruction. Forty-two teachers from 14 rural Missouri school districts were invited to participate in three 1-day workshops held in the 1991-92 school year. The teachers were taught to use Texas Instrument Explorer calculators, encouraged to explore numbers and number relationships with the calculators, and asked to design five higher-level lessons to utilize the calculator. Results of a questionnaire used to assess changes in the teachers' (n=29) instructional approaches indicated no significant differences materialized in the teachers' teaching approaches and teachers hold misconceptions about such concepts such as division by zero. Pretest and posttest analysis of the students' (n=412) attitudes toward mathematics indicated that students developed a more positive attitude on scales dealing with value of division, willingness to do division, enjoyment of division, calculator use, and overall perception of mathematics. (MDH)

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert