Just ordered a DM42

[Androsynth]

Thanks for the responses, some good info here (thanks for the program suggestions Dave).

And yeah, I agree, the internet is fairly toxic these days, but it's also a great resource. My Dad was a teacher, and one thing he taught me was to love learning, and that learning did not require a school.

Diving back into math has made me realize just how bad our teaching of it is in general. If someone as a kid, had told me 'hey you love writing yeah? Well, math is the language you use to describe the universe around you' and let me actually play around with it, I would have had an entirely different experience, I think.

It's been interesting seeing the different design philosophies of Ti/Casio/HP in terms of the calculators. TI/Casio are designed (generally) to be easy to use, but at the same time, the actual steps involved in solving something are often obscured by the routine you're using to solve it. Type it in, hit enter, get an answer. Nothing wrong with that, if you use it to shorten time but not understanding.

HP (excluding the Prime, but that's another post) forces you to break down the problem you're solving into small pieces due to RPN, and your brain is what sorts/organizes the sequence. What I've found in learning math, is that if I can come up with an RPN/RPL program to do something, than I really do understand it. If I can't, very often I can see exactly where in the problem I'm making a mistake.

Doing rote exercises really isn't the best way to learn math, I'm finding. It's more playing around with it, and in the process, you learn how it expresses the world around you.

It's like I spent 12 years of school learning grammar, and only now am learning 'hey, you can write a story with this thing'