Four months after I made my first math video about multiplication, I finally made the long-promised video about how we do short division. You can watch the video below or on YouTube here.
You'll notice that the short division method really isn't substantially different from the long division method most of us learned in school. However, the written procedure is different, and in my opinion, much simplified, making the process less daunting. And like the partial products method, short division allows you to check your work and uncover errors more quickly than the traditional long division method.
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This is how I was taught to divide in school. We were taught short division first and when everyone had got the hang of that, we were taught long division. I know a lot of people who use other methods or use short division every time, but personally I use short division when I'm dividing by a single-digit number and long division when it's more than one digit.
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Joy Reply:
January 14th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
@Fern, I've really discovered recently how differently people have been taught the basic operations of multiplication and division. I was always taught long division in school, and ended up learning short division on my own. I thought it was a much simpler way of doing things and I really wonder why my school didn't teach it that way at all.
So far I've found very few people who were even familiar with short division, but I have a feeling there are more out there than I thought.
It's too bad more kids aren't exposed to multiple methods of doing math like you were so they can choose the one that works best for them.
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Fern Reply:
January 16th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
@Joy,
Hm – that's curious. Perhaps it's taught differently in England? My primary school certainly were VERY big on teaching us different methods for things – I can remember endless lessons being taught to do addition/multiplication/division in different ways but I've always preferred the 'standard' methods.
I'm in the highest maths set in my school in a class doing an extra GCSE, but hardly anyone in my class can do long division (which I only discovered when we were being taught dividing polynomials). Many people denied they'd ever seen such a method before or couldn't remember it if they ever had – a symptom of the calculator generation?
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Thanks for taking the time to share this. I will use it with my math-challenged son next week. I will let you know how it goes.
I love your blog!
-Phyllis
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I absolutely love your math videos! I've never seen short division before, but always assumed it existed. Why else would division be called "long division"?
Phoebe @ Getting Freedom´s last blog ..Kitchen Oil Sprayer
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Nice post. It reminded me of 360's list of 25 ways to multiply. It doesn't seem that there are as many truly different ways of doing division, but I suspect that if you look closely at the different multiplication techniques listed there you might find some alternatives to the usual division methods as well.
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Wow…honestly never learned to do short division like this. Looking forward to showing it to my 2 oldest students today! Thanks!
Amanda Schoolfield´s last blog ..Bun in the Oven
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