Long-time Hoop-lah readers and those forced to listen to me know I get a little bunchy about the elementary math curriculum. Our district implemented a new one two years ago and honestly - I'm convinced it was created by a bunch of wackos who bought their advanced degrees from a fictional university.
I didn't think it could get any worse than math facts being eliminated from daily work. After all, who needs to know those? They can just look up the answers on their phones. But they do have to be able to figure out the area of a room. Priorities, people. But I digress. That was last year's problem.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago when Carly asked for help with division. Silly me, I got out my paper and pencil and showed her step by step how to solve it. The only problem was that she looked at me like I was speaking German. (Which, by the way, I can totally do.)
I quickly figured out that she had no idea what I was talking about. Long division is taught differently these days, something about quotients and estimating that make no sense to me. No sense at all. Doing it that way took her about 10 minutes to come up with an answer. The "traditional" way took about 10 seconds.
You gotta love progress.
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