That is rather alien to me, but I am pretty certain it is not the norm (my old school-district, where my mother is still a teacher, certainly doesn't have anything like that). Even so, I doubt an English teacher would take kindly to her pulling out her laptop in the middle of class... I've had plenty of university professors that would freak out if you tried that.

(Also keep in mind, that for most of the time-periods when calculator hacking was popular, web development was also a thing (I was heavily into this stuff during the late 90s and very early 00's). I did that stuff in highschool but it simply didn't interest me in the same way. Calculators were limited, and that presented both a challenge and a goalpost. Doing the same stuff with webdev? That is mundane and discouraging because you know that, at an entry level, you are not exploring the bounds of the medium in any meaningful way..

It is like the difference between seeing how fast you can go down a hill on a skateboard, and how fast you can go on the highway with your mother's minivan. Rotate a few triangles with webgl... or optimize a trig table in z80 assembly....

When I came home at the end of the day, I would fire up my PC and started editing some z80 assembly on it instead of programming the computer itself. Hell, I would test on a calculator emulator running on the PC...)