Polynomial Long Division.

It certainly would be easier to divide polynomials if the kids knew how to divide numbers using long division.

Many claimed they never learned.  It's always the teacher's fault, right?

So long division today; I was hoping to also get to synthetic division but that certainly didn't happen. Hopefully once they see it they'll forgive me for the long division pain. :)

What was interesting was that I actually had kids asking me if I'd make a screencast of a long division talk-through. I'm at basketball practice then an indoor soccer game tonight so it's not going to happen, but I did find a video on YouTube from PatrickJMT that I thought did a nice job of explaining.


I also was playing with Anna Hester's box method of dividing, which is super nice.  It's based on the kids using the lattice (area) method of multiplication but working backwards. So many of them like to multiply that way that hopefully dividing that way might be nice too.

Here's Anna's explanation:

Comments

  1. Interesting! Do they often seek out screencasts to help understand what they're learning in class? Could be cool to have them do pair debates about the two methods.

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