They don't teach long division anymore...!

[ElaClaw]

My dd is in the first year of secondary and during some revision work came across a sum where long division would be useful. She swore that she has never done long division and I was adamant that she would have done it in Primary school.

Fast forward to parents' evening. I asked the (young) maths teacher and he says that long division is no longer part of the curriculum (he even said he didn't even know how to do it until a couple of years ago when he taught himself for personal interest.

Apparently they just use a calculator.

Im probably old enough to be your mum. I am the wrong side of 50

Only just! Next time I see my mum I will ask her to demonstrate. She says they were taught methods to do calculations but never why they were doing it.

Long division sucks; so glad they learn better methods nowadays.
Some of the math methods I was routinely taught made yr6 DD cry real tears.

Haven't read the full thread but Long division isn't taught in Scotland anymore. The same as the teacher in the OP I didn't get taught it at school and don't teach it to my pupils either.

I'm the same as Bruffin's DS - only much older. I have 2 O levels (1 AO) and 2 A levels in Maths and I NEVER mastered long division because it seemed such an awfully longwinded and unnecessary way to deal with anything. I've just had a look at an example on the web, and got lost half way down it (again!)

The example they gave is 425/25. Well that's pretty easy anyway, and I can do it as mental arithmetic in very short time; but for the sake of argument my way of dividing is to (in this case) say:
25 into 4 doesn't go.
25 into 42 goes 1, remainder 17. Write the 1 on top of the box, write the 17 in front of the remaining 5.
25 into 175 goes 7 - write this next to the 1 on top of the box.

Answer = 17, job done, no messing around with lines and lines of extraneous writing.

I did get told off quite frequently in my Maths for "not showing my working" but I honestly couldn't see the point!

I would use the term 'short division' to describe the "bus stop" method we would use for e.g. 674 divided by 3 - and we teach that starting in Year 4 / 5.

I would use the term 'long division' for division of a large number by a 2-digit number. We teach that to more able Year 5s, and most Year 6s, but many children prefer to use a less 'compact' method based on chunking for such calculations.

It will depend on the school's calculation policy. Ours does not dwell on chunking (though we have grid multiplication as a much more major stage). others will.

The aim, after all, is for all children to have egficient written methods THAT THEY UNDERSTAND for all the calculations that they might reasonably be asked to do without a calculator.

Tbh, the issue for children is not usually with the method per se, and many will whisk through page after page of bare number problems with no issues. It is often to do with understanding what the problem means and thus the calculations that must be done to solve it.

I hate to tell you, Thumbnutswitch, but you have just described long division. The bits you don't like to bother with are just the bits where you show your working out of the "remainder" to carry into the next column (ie do a subtraction sum).

And I never got marked down for not showing that bit of the working, so long as I had clearly got the correct remainder to carry over to the next column (which I would do as little numbers up in the "bus stop" rather than bothering with the "lines and lines of extraneous writing"). I still call that long division, because I view that method as being the idea that you can deal with the numbers in the question in the way you described, starting out with 25s into 4, then 25s into 42 then 25s into 175).

StarsAboveYou My DS is in P7 and he's learning long division right now so some Scottish schools still teach it!

I was told it wasn't long division because it wasn't doing all the other mutliplying and whatever down the page. But meh - I still don't really care some 30 years later!

I was told that it doesn't matter how you work out the answer as long as it is right and the working out can be done any way, likewise.
Is this not true now?
My dd is H.ed and she tries various ways of working out until she finds one that fits.
atm it is the old way we did it at school, the answer on top of the line.
She also does long multiplication in columns.
What is chunking?

Chunking would allow a person to stick with multiplications they are comfortable with to work their way up to how many, eg, 25s there are in 425.

So, for example, you might say:
25x10=250

425-250=175
25x4=100
175-100=75
25x3=75
10+4+3=17 Therefore there are 17 25s in 425

I don't see how chunking could work to convert fractions to decimals, though, whereas using the bus stop method it is easy to carry the calculations on into decimals if there would otherwise be a remainder/fraction.

Does anyone know if you can use chunking to do 25/425 (rather than 425/25) with the answer expressed in decimal places, not as a fraction? I don't know any way other than the "bus stop" method (or a calculator) to do this, so as a result think it a bit silly not to teach the bus stop method (with or without the "long" division bit where you record the answers to your multiplications so that you can take these away from the number you were dividing into so as to get the remainder to carry over to the next column... which effectively does make it as long winded as chunking...). I would be delighted to be shown another way. If there isn't, then I'm pleased someone didn't say there was no need to teach this method to me!

I guess you could try to times the bottom fraction by a number to get it to 10, 100, 1000, 10000 etc, etc and then times the top by the same number? That could take ages to work out, though, unless it was something easy, like 1/2=5/10=0.5.

Rabbitstew,

i wonder whether the way to go about it would be to do 'chunks' of 0.1x, then 0.01x etc?

No chunks of 0.1 x 425 (42.5) can get into 25.

So 'how many chunks of 4.25 (0.01 x 425) can I get into 25' - well, probably at 5 because I know that 5 x 5 = 25 whereas 5 x 4 = 20. So that's 0.05

So 25 - 21.25 = 3.75.

Then 'how many chunks of 0.425 (0.001 x 425) can I get into 3.75' etc.

But at this level it probably requires a more sophisticated understanding of maths than 'old fashioned' long division does (whether expressd in the long winded way or simply a version of 'bus stop' that allows 2 digit remainders) ...

Hmm. The bus stop method has the great virtue of letting you think of each step of division you do as a whole number going into a larger whole number, which is something most people find far easier to cope with - I know a lot of people would take 0.037 away from 0.45, for example (if doing it as mental arithmetic) by multiplying both numbers by 1,000 to make 450-37=413 and then dividing by 1,000 again to make 0.413. The bus stop method sorts all this out for you without you having to think about it or creating tonnes of written proofs, and I don't in all honesty see the harm in that, if you understand why it works. Chunking decimals just looks really difficult!

Yes - I wouldn't teach chunking for decimals answers, and I do teach the bus stop method for decimals (and for expressing a remainder as a decimal).

I was just thinking through how you MIGHT do it IYSWIM?

Yes, ISWYM! Hopefully it proves to those who think it doesn't matter what method you use, that sometimes the "old fashioned" way is rather good and most definitely shouldn't be dropped off the curriculum!

Thanks for this discussion :)