I used those calculators too, the TRS 80 had some features that other programmable calculators did not have, like testing a solution and one click back to the equation. I thought of that as a great learning tool.
You are also right about what has been lost. As a math teacher, I felt embarrassed taking my calculator out because I was so slow doing math in my head. I knew others who could do very large problems in their head and get answers that were close enough to be the basis for an engineering trade study.
Funny thing about the early math, after teaching it for 9 years, I could recall how to do every problem and often could recall the “trick” that a student needed to get to the right answer quickly. I cannot do the really hard ones, like you see on youtube, but the SAT test questions are not a problem anymore, and I suspect I could figure out the height of a tree. Students can learn the same things we learned, if asked to do the same problems. The solution is in how math is taught, and how much the teacher knows about the math they are teaching.
when I returned to school my first work study job was assisting students with learning disabilities in the math and reading labs. Up until that time I had assumed that our minds all worked in basically the same way. But I discovered immediately while tutoring that this was not the case.
Within a short time a work study job opened up at the computer lab at the business center which was more in line with my interests, but what I learned trying to help people with learning disabilities was helpful to me there as well.
I had taken the firefighter civil service test twice before, but each time there were around 5000 test takers for about 30 jobs over three years. At that time half the jobs were set aside for affirmative action and veterans got a several point advantage, so it was a fairly futile exercise. But the format of the written test was changed that year to make it less “discriminatory” toward women and minorities. It was very similar to an SAT which my year back in school had sharpened me up for. So my education was cut short once again when I was hired by the fire department after getting a near perfect score.
I would have to say that what I learned assisting other students in my work study jobs was actually more valuable in my career as a fire officer than what I learned in the classroom. I also gained a healthy respect for the challenges that teachers face... especially math teachers. So thank you for your patience and service to your community.