Comment by CivBase

I got a ton of value out of mine... but I graduated in 2011, when smartphones were only just taking off and relatively few people had them yet.

But my wife is also a high school teacher and one of the most consistent problems I hear about from her is smartphones being a distraction. If she lets a kid use their smartphone as a calculator, odds are they'll soon be scrolling content feeds, playing games, or chatting with others. If her school required students to have a graphing calculator with limited functionality, it would probably be a benefit to her classroom.