I was curious about the partial product and partial quotient methods so I watched a few videos explaining the methods. The partial product method looked like the method my son learned for doing double digit multiplication mentally. The partial quotient method looked like too much writing. My 11 year old son would much rather do mental math anywhere he can because he has motor dyspraxia and writing of any kind slows him down. He likes to use his own partial mental math method when he does math of any kind.

I had to let him figure out how to compensate for his dysgraphia when we tried everything that other people suggested for the lining up columns in multi-digit multiplication and division. He didn't like using graph paper. It seems to work best for him to figure it out how to compensate for the writing disability on his own. For him, Life of Fred and mental math books are working well.

My daughter, who is very capable in math but is NOT advanced, is also bored with the EM curriculum. Why? Because when she *does* get something, she still has to do it with very little variation again, and again, and again, and again.... Not just this year, but next year, and the next.

A friend of mine is an education consultant tasked with supporting EM in a nearby district. I once asked her what there is to love about EM. (I want to believe it's a good program, truly.) She told me that many kids will fail at math because they can't cope with rote memorization and drills, and EM offers another way. I didn't say anything, but I can't help but thinking that having to write out 20 seven-digit numbers using words for homework is its own kind of pain, too, especially when you've been doing it for a couple of weeks at school, and you did it quite capably the year before too. Knowing how to read numbers is essential, but writing them out longhand is tedious and unnecessary once the skill has been acquired.

It's really, really hard to convince a kid that an assignment like this is worth doing.

That doesn't sound like any canned HW paper that I remember. Was it an official EM sheet? If anything, I find the EM homework to be incredibly "light". It sounds like perhaps your school is doing more repetition than the program intends.