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OH my goodnes...

I just don’t understand the whole “messing with math” idea..

What in the world is wrong with teaching the basics?

Our sons did Saxon .. first in Christian School ..later homeschooling for the younger one. Basic repetitive mathmatics... they loved it ... we loved it because we could understand it...

Maybe you’ve seen this — an indictment of the stuff taught in “Everyday Mathematics”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI

Interesting. I agree that the standard algorithms should be taught. I learned them, and since education is a cultural endeavor, I expect my grandchildren to learn them - at least to the extent that no new and unambiguously superior method is developed. Full Stop.
But it certainly is true that calculators work. In fact, as an engineering student I gradually became so habituated to the use of a slide rule that if I decided to divide 4 by 2 I would begin to reach for it before realizing what I was doing.
And it is also true that the "standard algorithm" for division is in fact an iterative procedure. The example the video presented wasn't actually long division because the example divisor was singe digit. Actual long division tends to trial and error. The reality is that the word for not using a calculator (or computer spreadsheet) when you have a long division problem is, "stupid."
The reality is that people with the interest and ability to do mathematics (as for example, engineering) do not necessarily learn that they are good at it by drilling in long division. The reality is that digital chips are transcendently better suited to the purpose than the human brain (savants excepted) is. The reality is that the human brain is better than the computer at one particular thing - and that is defining the problem to be calculated, and making use of the result. And teaching how to decide what arithmetic to do is what I see the math books struggling toward. All I know is that my elementary teachers didn't emphasize that skill, and that I was unusual in my class because I cared about that issue. Others groaned if the Arithmetic assignment was "word problems"; I groaned if the Arithmetic assignment was not word problems.