[saquin]

[leda]

ping for my math wiz :)

[Always Right]

In a joint statement, five leaders of the Mathematical Association opposed the change. "Don't let us go back to the bad old days with books full of pages of vertical sums when only a minute percentage of pupils understood what they were doing and only a third could carry out calculations,"

That is a telling statement. These 'educators' perspective is from that of an idiot who could not perform simple arithmetic. 'Only a minute percentage' was more like 90%, they were just in the 10% who could not do it.

[raybbr]

Chunk(ing)

[snarks_when_bored]

The Brits (and many others) appear to have forgotten this pearl of wisdom from Alfred North Whitehead, one of their great thinkers:

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

(from his Introduction to Mathematics, first published in 1911)

[glorgau]

Actually, the grid and chunking methods are the ones I use when doing it without the benefit of having a pen at hand. Seems kind of wasteful to have children struggle with extra steps.

[Seamoth]

The grid method is interesting!

[BreitbartSentMe]

huked on foniks werked for me

[latina4dubya]

i've never really considered myself a math person, although i've never shyed away from it... language is more my thing... however, i am having the best time teaching my boys math as i homeschool them... i've never let them know that i don't consider myself a "math person." we do 90 minutes of math a day, no matter what... my boys do 30 minutes of fun math games, practical math and math puzzles before we go into the new lesson... we spend about an hour learning the new concept and then doing the written work...

some days i'll do a timed drill on basic math facts... the success for us has been having my boys learn those basic math facts down cold during the first three years of school...

[Ole Okie]

Do kids still memorize the multiplication tables? This was one of the things we did in the third grade.

[snowsislander]

I don't think there is a problem with using either of these methods as such. Certainly emphasizing that division as repeated subtraction is the analog of multiplication as repeated addition seems like a worthy idea, as is being done with the "chunking" method.

As well, emphasizing the distributive property as they are doing in the "grid" multiplication method isn't a bad thing in my estimation.

The problems that I see generally aren't the methods presented in arithmetic. Most usually the problem that I see is that the teachers themselves often don't understand what they are presenting, even at this truly elementary level of mathematics. They instead will present a method out of any context and if a child makes a connection between the grid method and, say, a traditional "carry" method, then the teacher is unable to make the same connection.

However, I would suggest that teachers teaching the "chunking" method for division emphasize that similarly multiplication is merely repeated addition, rather than simultaneously teaching the "grid" multiplication method, which does not reinforce that concept.

Also, I didn't realize that the Brits are using radical "" notation to indicate division. I would have read their notation in the division examples as taking the sixth root of 196 rather than as dividing 196 by six.