I was just griping about partial quotients last night. I get all the other 'partials' and can do them....I may not necessarily like those methods, but I can do them. However, I just can NOT get partial quotients.
I love partial quotients as I understand them--much easier and more efficient than long division. I don't use EM though, so I'm not entirely sure that it means the same thing within that curriculum. I always think of partial quotients as just using the easiest multiplication chunks to solve the problem. I like it because it doesn't obscure the place value and it lets me pull out the "easy" parts first. For instance, with a problem like 5,468 divided by 4:
rather than go through it in a long series of steps, I can look at what's obvious to me based on what I know about 400, 60 and 8: 1,117 x 4 is 4,468 and then know I still have 1,000 left to divide (250)for a grand total of 1,367.
However, I have to say that I was a long division disaster--so many sequential steps, so little patience on my part....
