Long Division

I've been sitting with younger daughter for the past half hour while she works doggedly at her math homework. As a math teacher, I'm both pleased and horrified at the work she has to do.

The Good:

• Someone has taught her to use big 0.5 inch graph paper to line up the problem
• She has amazing notes from class on why you need to know division, and its relationship to multiplication
• She has five steps to follow

The Bad:

• She has twenty problems to do, along with all of her other homework
• She's just finding quotients, and the remainders can apparently go hang
• she doesn't really understand what she's doing

This is a child who is doing her level best to produce what her teachers want. She doesn't really understand what the process is about, or what is happening with the numbers, or what she's actually accomplishing, other than completing her homework and checking that task off the list.

How is this learning? Or, where is the benefit to my child? It isn't intellectual growth as I understand it, but I don't teach middle school. What am I missing?

That being said, I'm really pleased with her school today. Over the weekend she and her best/only friend had a playdate-gone-awry with lots of quarreling and misunderstanding. Younger daughter wrote a long e-mail to the adjustment counselor, who made time to write her back, meet with her today, call me, and to offer to sit down with both girls later in the week to help them find ways to disagree productively.