I this sums up my first math experience in the US high school. Learning before moving to the US, we were not allowed any calculators. My first class the teach wrote something basic like quadratic equation to solve. To my shock, out went the TI-83 graphing calculators.

I was done with the problem before my peers even hit the right keys in their pocket computers (TI-83 is not a calculator, but a computer pretending to be a calculator).

I still think the non-calculator way of teaching math gave me better skills down the road.

You don't have a calculator, so you're calculating logarithms by hand?

You understand that slide rules existed before calculators, yeah?