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Partial Quotients? That's the method my kids were taught at school for two years, right up until they were told at the end of 5th grade that they would have to learn the "old-fashioned parent way" because EDM wasn't used in middle school. Gaah! Thankfully I had shown my kids the "old-fashioned" way years before and they preferred that way anyway.
Last edited by mnmom23; 11/08/1308:34 AM. Reason: Added Link
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!"
The only thing more evil, IMO, is the ubiquitous Box and Whisker...
which seems specifically intended to induce confusion about statistical significance and measurement errors later on.
Wait! I think that I have just had an epiphany about why so few people seem to understand what is (or is not) intended with respect to "statistical significance." WOW. Thank you, New Math.
Oh god, stem and leaf and box and whisker. I remember those from a few years ago when DS was doing them. He understands them, thankfully, so he was able to explain them to me. (I do not look forward to DD getting there.) But ...just... WHY? Why do they have to take things that are perfectly understandable and turn them into counterintuitive collections of garbage?
Turning multiplication into an addition problem the way that box thing did may make it easier to come up with an answer (for people who haven't memorized their multiplication tables), but it doesn't in any way teach one how to multiply, or what multiplication actually is.
Isn't it insane? Why would you go through all that extra effort to do the same thing? And the only answer is: because you haven't learned the multiplication tables to know that if 8 times 7 is 56, then 6 is a good place to start for 83 going into 5567 or whatever. It just makes so much more work!
