Can you do long division?

[Noperope]

Attempting to help dd with her 11plus homework and feeling more and more stupid by the minute. Could you work out 324 divided by 4 with only pen and paper? No cheating and you must show your work, not just write the answer!

Bus stop is the method they would want to see.

/ is the symbol used for division in programming languages. Presumably it came from that?

Oh. That's makes sense 🙂

I’m not sure I’d remember how to do it correctly written down but I too can do it in my head instantly. 40 x 7 is 280, 6 x 7 is 42 so 46 plus 2/7 or .285.

I can do it in my head, and I’d do it on paper too BUT I definitely can’t do it (or even remember) the way I was taught at school.

I think I understand now. Short division is with remainders, so long division is with the arrows working downwards?

I don't think that's long division.

Long division is something like 1256 / 37 for example.

Understanding that division is basically reversed multiplication - so you can use your 7x table knowledge to work out that 10 x 7 = 70, 20 x 7 = 140, 30 x 7 = 210, 40 x 7 = 280 and then you can see you just need 44 more - so 6 x 7 gets you another 42 and you have 2 left.

So 324 / 7 is 46 r 2 (or 46 2/7)

You can have remainders with long division

A remainder is simply the bit that's left if you in your example have 324 / 7 so if you had 324 people and put them into 7 groups, you would have 46 groups of 7 people and 2 people left over

Nope. Stymied me in school and still does.

And long division with examples such as 9874 / 17

You need to be able to multiply by 17 to get near to 98. So you get 5 (as 5 *17 = 85) Then you put the 5 on the top, write 85 underneath and subtract that from 98. Keep on doing it
Or use a calculator and know your answer is going to be between 500 and 600

I think, having googled, that the bus stop method is what I was taught at school, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't given that name, merely long division.

Why is it called bus stop? That doesn't make sense to me.

I would have no problems with this sum, but I learnt tables so those are always in my head.

I think of long division where you’re diving by double digits, eg 324 divided by 14.

Ditto - spent my entire career in finance and accounting, and never been able to grasp long division. I don't know what bus stop is either.

Edit - just looked up 'bus stop' - it's short division so why don't they just call it that then?

This is what I was taught in Junior school. I have no idea how they do it now though.

That's not long division - it's the sort of basic division that my daughter was doing when she was 7.i would be very worried if I couldn't work that out, and I've never been very good at maths.

That's how they do it.

I think it's also useful to know why 324 / 7 is 46 remainder 2

How can you check you have the right answer?

Yes.
Take the number 324.
Start with the first number.
3 isn't divisible by 4, so you go to the next number which is 32. 32 divided by 4 is * 8.
That leaves 4 which divided by 4 is *1.

Answer 81

I remember having to show my younge very bright nephew how to do long division and multiplication with workings at age 10.
I ended up with 4 children at a new year's eve party in a corner doing maths...
I kid you not.
They were all so shocked at how simple it was compared to the way their teacher was explaining it.

They did try to tell the children off next term but their dad went in and made the teacher back off

The OP has corrected herself, it’s 324 divided by 7. I’d use your method though.

I can do that one in my head and probably by the bus stop method but never did get the hang of proper long division and I have got A level maths.

I think / for division is pretty universal now, I would never use an old fashioned divide sign on a computer (I use maths in my work including writing out equations), not sure what I do if handwrite a formula

Do you think they understood what long division was - or do you think they just learnt an algorithm?

And could they have checked their calculation was correct by doing an inverse operation?

Long division and short division are exactly the same in terms of what maths is done and in what order, it’s just that in long division you show your steps whereas in short division lots is done mentally. But the actual maths is identical. Generally, you’d use short division for a question where you know the relevant times table, and long division when you don’t. But they are interchangeable.

bus stop = short division. I tell children it’s because it’s because you draw a bus stop (a vertical line and a horizontal line) separating the divisor and the other number (quotient?!?)

@cakeorwine I would have said 46 times 7.

Yes I know how to do long division as I was taught it in school in the 80s.

I now teach both short division and long division in primary school.

I would not use long division for the calculation your DC has been given OP. Pupils are taught to use the most efficient method in SATs so for that question it's short division.

As others have said, long division is for when you are dividing by a double digit number. The example attached shows that the pupil needs to list out the multiples of the divisor first then start the long division with the layout shown. This keeps the workings out nice and clear. In SATs tests these questions are worth 2 marks. If you don't get the right answer but show a correct method with one error you can still pick up a mark, and that's why for those GD pupils it's worth knowing.

The crazy thing about long division is that (if you can't so say your 17 times table in your head), you need to do separate workings to see how many 17s you need to get to say 89 in 8979 / 17