Division: How Not To Do It.

Had to edit this to remove the swearing...for the more delicate viewers...



Our teaching of mathematics has devolved into blindly following those who have gone before us who broke down division into the algorithm of multiply and subtract, without any knowledge of what it MEANS and what we are doing with the symbols.

Basically division is subtracting very quickly, the quotient is how many times we can subtract the divisor from the dividend...we use multiplication to to make this process fast and supposedly easy. Ask any 6th grader how much they like long division...

What you see here is just a smattering of pages on the WWW that claim to teach division, I point out places where zeros don't need to be and where they should be but aren't...the problem with 25 as the divisor is a great example...aren't there four 25's per hundred? This might be useful in solving the problem...

Also beware of using multiplication tables to get students to memorize multiplication facts.

All of this and I still haven't gotten to the Boy Scouts and cinnamon bun stories Jerry Mortensen was famous for telling when introducing division concepts to students of any age, from 4 to 84...

Worksheets coming that show how to do it the right way are coming SOON.

Go to Crewton Ramone's House Of Math for more...like the pages on a much better way to introduce and teach division (and multiplication) found here.