Expensive but necessary and worth the cost

This is the calculator my daughter was required to have in her advanced math classes in middle school, and she was able to continue using it in high school. Very dependable, and considering it lasted her 6 full years of regular use without a battery switch, I'm pretty impressed! It still works, and now her brother will start using it in the fall.

I have had great luck with Texas Instrument calculators and I would definitely recommend this unit. I think I paid around $150 but I've seen it on sale since then for considerably less (grr). It does all of the tasks you need a graphing calculator to do, and it came with an instructive booklet to help new users learn how to perform the many functions it's designed to do.

The only downside I see (which is from a mom/old-school perspective) is that it does all of the work for the student instead of teaching them how to generate graphs and whatnot on their own. However, in today's fast paced classrooms (especially the AP courses), there is no time to sit there with pencil and paper. Anyway, I suppose they used to say the same thing when calculators offered logarithmic and trigonometric functions :)