I help DD with her math homework, and she brought me a question with partial quotients. I had to throw up my hands on it. DW came to my rescue with a Youtube video on the method. I still wasn't able to help her, though, because the worksheet had bizarrely filled in some numbers in random places, and it wasn't at all intuitive as to why they'd chosen those.
It's not at all intuitive as to why one wouldn't simply use long division, but I digress.
It's strange that they call that alternative "long division," because partial quotients makes it much longer.
This week, DD brought home a question that required her to find the mode of a set of numbers, but first it required her to arrange them in a completely useless and counter-intuitive chart, whose name I forget (something like seed-and-tree).
So let's say the numbers were these: 79, 83, 88, 92, 93, 93, 96, 98.
Here's the chart:
7 | 9
8 | 3, 8
9 | 2, 3, 3, 6, 8
DD takes a look at this chart, and when asked to find the mode of this set of numbers, says, "3!"
Way to teach number sense...
