On 20/08/2011 11:49 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
> Can you imagine anything more MIND-NUMBINGLY BORING than staring at a
> sheet of 40 long division problems? YES, I GET IT! I KNOW HOW LONG
> DIVISION WORKS! STOP BUGGING ME ALREADY! >_<
>
> Seriously. If you know how it works, do you really need to do it 200
> times over just to *prove* that you know how it works?

Wrong, it's not to prove that it works. It is to drum into your "thick 
little head" how to do it with out thinking. Compare it to repeating a 
dance step until your body does not think of the individual moves. Then 
you can build on it.

> It's not even
> like it's particularly important to be able to *do* long division; it
> isn't something you're going to need to do every day of your adult life.

You don't know how to do mental arithmetic, then?

> You just need to have a firm grasp of /how/ it works and /why/ it works.
> Once you've got that, practising it on endless question sheets is just
> an utter waste of time.

It is if you don't want to be numerate. And BTW adding, subtracting, 
dividing and multiplying is arithmetic not maths.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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