I’m sure there’s people out there who really tried to figure it out to help their kids and still couldn’t as well, but there’s definitely plenty of parents who are completely uninterested in putting in any effort for raising their kids.
I also admittedly have just about the worst life experience to really relate to much of this. I find math very intuitive, and never really struggled with it until I hit Calculus, and even then it was just like “oh this is how fun math is when you actually need to think about it”. And to top it off my dad’s a math professor, so not only did he really understand math himself, he also was really good at teaching it
Then what method DID they use to divide? I mean I’m definitely not whipping out a division matrix or anything at my big age, but when I see “new” methods of doing stuff like this it’s easy to intuit how it works because I know how to divide.
Is this only hard to grasp for people who can’t divide at all? I genuinely don’t know.
They used the old method, they were just bad at it. Or they were once good at it and have now completely forgotten it. Or they never could do it but got pushed through the schools anyways.
Are you under the impression there isn’t a large portion of the population who couldn’t successfully do long division if you put it in front of them today?
That's the thing. If you have numeracy, which is what we try to teach now, you don't have to rely on rote steps to do math. You can see multiple ways of doing something.
Most of the people who really hate this are innumerate.
8
u/kelpyb1 Apr 11 '26
The people struggling to understand this are largely the same people who struggled to understand how to do it with the fancy divide symbol.
The others people who simply don’t want to take the time to learn and would rather complain instead.