Millennial versus Gen Z Math: 430 ➗ 5 #commoncore #math #division #partialquotients #silentmath

[rubyrasberrie]

as a gen z i can say with confidence that i have never seen the second way in my life

[TheFrostASMR]

I’m gen z and know the normal division😐✋🏼😭

[abbs_]

as a gen z, i can confirm that i have never in my life used any other method than traditional divison

[ghostlaboratory]

Dude the normal division just makes more sense though. Why do extra steps?

[bobbun]

GenX here. I learned the first method, though as someone who studied math in college I have to say I see very little difference. For a method that's much faster, but specific to division by five, you can also get this result by dividing by ten and multiplying by two. Now that's a different method.

[tasfuu]

as a gen z i have never seen that method ever

[jmc]

Hey Teach…you say Millennials but you know we learned that from the generation before us. It’s worked with generations before us so why change what we already know that works? It’s the system that’s making our students lazy. I’m not a math teacher, but an English teacher and it amazes me how we have to change something that works all the time.

[kamilszumowski]

I was taught the partial quotients method in 5th grade, and the teachers forced us to use the method sometimes. I hated every second of it. Long division is fine.

Edit: I’m a sophomore, so I’m Gen Z

[scottabroughton]

I’m gen-x, so of course I learned the method on the left. The method on the left is a shortcut. 5 doesn’t really go into 43 because 43 is not a value in the problem. It’s actually 430, or 400+30. The method on the right shows this explicitly. 400 divided by 5 is 80 (first partial quotient) and 30 divided by 5 is 6 (second partial quotient).

So many times we prefer the shortcuts in math, which are usually more abstract, but we forget that many kids learning these operations need to be shown concrete, explicit methods before they can grasp the more abstract shortcuts.

[urfavfinley_]

i’m a gen z and we did the second version when we were just learning division because it was a little bit easier but now i’m in 8th and we do the first way

[gregoryt]

The first way required the student to know their Times Table. The other way, the student is removing chunks based on what occurs to the student to remove. The student could have removed 4 chunks of 100 and added 20+20+20+20. The student isn't locked into having to already know that 5*8 is 40. The first way is systematic top-down coding, while the second is more like generative AI.

[Zotalofen]

The second way is much faster to do in my head. People always wonder how I do math so fast. Taking apart the equation is much easier.

[scottabroughton]

I’m not knocking your questions, but people asking “Where did the 80 come from?” prove they learned a shortcut but don’t understand what’s actually being divided.

If I were to ask, “Where’d the 43 come from?” I’d be justified. The dividend is 430. Four hundred thirty. There’s no forty-three in that number.

BTW, I learned division in the 80s, so I was only taught “How many times does 5 go into 43?” Now that I teach 5-8 grade math, I see that kids need to be shown—and teach each other—multiple strategies, depending on their concrete to abstract thinking abilities.

[Emmy-vg]

Math should change, unless it’s a faster way of solving the problem.

[dawnfoxx]

Every kid in my class one year was taught to do it the “Gen Z” way because it was easier for them to understand. Thankfully my teacher was fine with me doing it the more efficient way.

[kyliegymnastics]

As a gen z, I can confirm I have no clue what the second one is

[aunt_cami]

Trying to understand this. How did you know to put the 80 to multiply it by 5?

[jasmines]

in the gen z part where did u get 80 from?

[atkpop]

I learned the other method before I learned the traditional method. even then, I still use the traditional one 😭

[ejake]

I think both methods should be taught so the students can pick which method is best for them.