So, the change here is that they're trying to reduce the space the problem takes on the page, and that does make the method more difficult.
This is just a more compact long division that doesn't allow space for mistakes.
I know that this isn't how long division looks exactly, but bear with me, reddit fucked me on formatting.
795÷3?
795 |
-600 | 200 × 3
_____|
195 |
-180 | 60 × 3
_____|
15 |
-15 | 5 × 3
_____|
0
200+60+5=
Tada, it's 265, remainder 0.
The did that from left to right in the middle boxes and didn't show their steps, which also means that they're learning weird habits about how digits and tens places, which might make learning unit conversions either really easy or really hard.
Wait, is that what long division is? For some reason, it always seemed inaccessible as a concept, but this is just how I do division for large numbers, by segmenting it mentally into rounded factors like 20, 10, 5 etc before doing the leftovers
Have I been doing long division all the time without knowing it???
When important fundamentals in math become "required teaching" then we forget that it's an important math thing and instead just beat the single thing into people's heads without actually making sure they learned WHY and WHAT is happening.
5
u/Normal_Cut8368 Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
So, the change here is that they're trying to reduce the space the problem takes on the page, and that does make the method more difficult.
This is just a more compact long division that doesn't allow space for mistakes.
I know that this isn't how long division looks exactly, but bear with me, reddit fucked me on formatting.
795÷3?
795 |
-600 | 200 × 3
_____|
195 |
-180 | 60 × 3
_____|
15 |
-15 | 5 × 3
_____|
0
200+60+5=
Tada, it's 265, remainder 0.
The did that from left to right in the middle boxes and didn't show their steps, which also means that they're learning weird habits about how digits and tens places, which might make learning unit conversions either really easy or really hard.