Honestly, lets be real. The only problem here is when you try and help your kid with their maths homework and you both insist the other is doing it the wrong way. And long division is really where the proverbial hits the fan.

I was off school on the few days they covered long division, 15 years ago or so, and never bothered to learn it. To this day I never had a clue how to do it... but i don't think i'll ever forget divide, multiply and subtract, bring it on down and bring it on back.

I think the excess bureaucracy in teaching these days takes away from teachers being able to tailor and refine their methods to deliver things in a memorable way.

In a society where you expect the children to never leave their home communities and where their future education and job are predestined by where they live, that might make sense. I don't want that kind of stratification. That opens up situations where Bible belter children are never exposed to evolution (for an easy target), or where some district just up and decided that heck, their kids never need to learn long division.

The ideal is a society that's much more fluid than that, and the reality is that this is a world where not only are the children from rural Arkansas going to be competing with the ones from NYC for colleges and jobs, but with people from all over the world. Kids can already be extremely hampered just because of where they went to school, which is what the CC (I'm assuming good intentions) was supposed to help. Obviously it is not doing a good job, but I think it's a matter of implementation rather than the idea itself.

I forgot how to do long division.

Interesting, but can it do long division at the bottom of a fresh water pond?

The method that allows me to do quick mental math is breaking down problems into a few easier subproblems. Divide 133 by 6: 133 = 120 + 12 + 1, the answer is 22.166, done in a second. It's good to teach that approach. I do math a lot but almost never use any of the paper and pencil algorithms that were taught in school. I was taught the lattice method and the standard algorithm in 4th grade, and at the time I thought the lattice was crap and both of them were a waste of time except for extremely large numbers.

I agree with her that math education sucks in many schools, but I think standard algorithms alone won't solve that. Some kids get so used to mechanical operations that they don't even know what the heck they're doing when they do it. They should at least be acquainted with dynamically reducing a problem to one or more simpler problems. That's the basis of almost all analytical thinking. I get freshmen in college who don't have a clue how to do mental long division or find the prime factorization of a number.

In the UK we learn the standard algorithms although they sort of forget about long division during secondary school until A level. I used long division for the first time in six years for algebraic division, luckily I still remembered the method I must say that even though my class is the top in our college there were still one or two people who couldn't understand it at all, which is slightly worrying. I was also very embarrassed at having to explain to one of my class mates from mechanics (the theoretical math type) how to use trig functions.