A Swinging Pendulum...

Birthday Celebrations at School Ah! Birthdays at school! What a great time to be a kid! To be that kid that brings in the yummy treats! I know my son was a 'best friend' to all one day when I sent in eight different boxes of Little Debbie treats so all of the kids could pick what they wanted. I told him to make sure that these are eaten AT LUNCH time. Your teacher has plans for the entire day and it does not include eating Cosmic Brownies and Honey Buns! Hopefully, all allergy-prone children found something they could eat, as well.  Then I let his teacher keep the rest and use them however she would like.  Quick, easy, yummy!  And, unfortunately, filled with sugar. How many times do our children consume sugar when we don't know about it? Some would say, "It's no big deal. They are kids. It's a part of growing up."  However when we consider the childhood obesity rate increasing in America, I did feel a tinge of guilt sending in the quick and easy sugar...

Long Division....  Why do we teach this monotonous process of division? Why?  Kids cry and start to hate math. In reality, very few will EVER use that process to divide. Most will resort to using a calculator because the process they were taught takes too long to use to get to the correct answer.  By the time they solve for that "zero" answer, or that "remainder" answer, the student thinks the answer to the never-ending subtraction problem is the actual answer to the division problem! The don't realize the numbers ON TOP of the division bar form the actual answer to the division problem! Why don't we teach short division? It is the regrouping method comparable to addition, subtraction and multiplication. When I teach this to my students, the end up enjoying division. Their response, "That's all it is?" What is short division? Here it is in a nut shell: The Math Page: Short Division (CREDIT: http://themathpage.com/ARITH/divide-who...