Frustrated parents sneak ‘old math’ to kids:
Victoria Morey has been known to sit down with her 9-year-old son and do something she’s not supposed to.
“I am a rebel,” confessed this mother of two.
And just what is this subversive act in which Morey engages — with a child, yet?
Long division.
Yes, Morey teaches her son, who’ll enter fifth grade in the fall, how to divide the old-fashioned way … in his fourth-grade class, long division wasn’t on the agenda.
Other than observing that we had to learn long division in third grade … and yes, I did walk to school, thank you, and even carried a tuba in later years …
This business of trying to teach abstractions to concrete-thinking nine-year-olds is nothing new, and it’s the same mis-directed thinking that convinced parents that learning phonics was the best way to learn a phonetic language, and that drilling the techniques was the best discipline to learning math. That’s why private- and homeschools do it differently than public schools — it’s not all about religion and socialization, you see, there are methodology questions too.
