In January of 1998, I was required to observe in a high school as one of my requirements to obtain a degree in education. I elected to go to Oswayo Valley High School, a school about twenty miles north of my own. It was a pleasant school, and I got a lot out of it.
A teacher there taught me to use the slide rule. Although this had little to do with education, it did have a major impact on me. For one thing, it gave this page a purpose. I'd had the homepage since October of 1997, and had little on it beyond a little about me. Now I have a large slide rule content. I gained another hobby, not that I really needed one, but it does give me an excuse to visit antique stores (they're full of fun toys, and saying I'm looking for slide rules gives me a legitimate reason to be there. Sometimes I even find one -- including a recent $15 beauty with 26 scales!!).
Beyond these benefits, I've also learned a bit about formatting the homepage, especially tables. More to the point, I've had a great intellectual benefit. First of all was the experience of figuring out how the scales were designed. Later I became familiar with logarithms. I also became better at estimating where the decimal point should be in an answer, and I became very comfortable with certain trigonometric identities.
Another fun thing is that the slide rule makes me unique in a small way. It's something people remember about me. Also, using it as a teacher, it amuses students, and can be used to tell them something about significant figures. With their calculators, they are strongly tempted to think that all those numbers on the display are important. (All right, maybe in math class they are, but I'm a science teacher!!!)
Lastly, even though I currently have no intention of selling, I should point out that slide rules will have a large collectible value. At the moment, they're cheap. People still toss them in the trash on a regular basis. Schools are still throwing them out. You can get them now and have a good value on reserve for thirty or forty years from now.
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