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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

Then you never knew it? Perhaps what you were taught wasn't long division. My kids were not taught the same math that I was taught in the 80s.

My 17 year old was struggling with the division algorithm they were teaching in Elementary school at the time (late 2000s). I can't remember the details but it was something I had never seen before that was a step up from throwing poop at the wall.

I showed her how to do long division and she still uses it to this day. It's simple and there is a history of work to easily identify errors.

The homework scene from The Incredibles 2 really hit home for me. I feel like book publishers development new methods or ways to teach the methods as a means to sell new editions of books, not because the new ways are better. This causes a rift in society because people no longer share a common understanding of a subject.

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Conversely I have been immediately impressed with the way my first grader is being taught math.

It’s completely different than the way I was taught so I have to invest in figuring it out but it’s led them extremely quickly through multiplication & division and into algebra.

I’d characterize it as “multi-algorithmic”. They come at it from a variety of algorithms, assumedly so that each student can find one that works for them.

As someone who had to teach themselves a different algorithm than I was taught many painful years later this resonates.

Perhaps the rift was always there and you ended up in the lucky side of it?

I remember when the common core debates were taking place, one of the memes running in parenting circles was a comparison of long division vs how common core taught division, and how much more “complicated” the common core version was.

But in reality the common core way explained the actual algorithm and the reason it worked so much better, and further, the only reason it appeared more complicated was because the people who were targeted by the meme already knew long division. If you took someone completely new to both methods, they’d find the more “complicated” algorithm far easier, because a large part of its complexity was explaining why the division worked, whereas long division was about memorizing a process.

My little brother was always better at Math than me. Whenever he tried to show me how to do something it was different than how our teachers showed us. He was really good at figuring out a method that made more sense for him, and it certainly worked for him.

Anyone who legitimately thinks common core is worse than how math was previously taught does not understand math at all. It is at worst just different with the dream of being better. There is no conspiracy theory about wanting to sell more books or to "separate the masses".

If you actually understand the math picking up the common core methods is minutes of work at worst.

It is nothing to do with book publishers, but new federal mandates for "Common Core" curriculum as part of the No Child Left Behind legislation.

It isn't a federal mandate, which can be seen because not all states adopted Common Core. There were federal incentives for states adopting a standard which has been recognized as effective, including Common Core.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_In...

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