Long Division

I remember in the fourth grade I was learning division.

We were just starting long division after having mastered our multiplication tables and timed tests the year prior. This was the year they decided to stop giving us perfectly divisible numbers. 

Gone were the days of 72 ÷ 8 = 9.

Oh no, this was the year things started to get messy.

This was the year they started giving us things like 86 ÷ 8.

But the things was, we didn't jump right into decimals. 

So we had to use remainders. (I apologize if the formatting doesn't work with my long division symbol, which interestingly doesn't have a name of its own.)

   10r6

8/86

   80

   06

Where the r6 at the end meant remainder of 6 that is not divisible by 8.

And because I was a precocious, well-read little shit child at the age of 10, I remember being somewhat livid at having to use that little r. I knew numbers, I'd seen a variety of them in my reading adventures and not once had I come across something like 10r6. It didn't make sense to me.

So I used a decimal point. Because I was familiar with decimal points. We used them with money to mark the difference between dollars and cent. They were in the numbers on the spines of books at the library. In short, I'd seen them in actual numbers.

I was adamant, even defiant about my use of decimal points. Silently, but stubbornly.

I remember my teacher, Miss Krantz, a transplant from somewhere in the South who tried to teach us it was pronounced O-KAN-o-gan in social studies (it's more like oaken-AU-gen), was okay with my use of decimals for a while but when she finally insisted I use the r instead of my decimal points, never really gave me a satisfying explanation other than they were different. I don't remember anyone else questioning this the way I did, but then I remember that Miss Krantz had a habit of tossing and catching her whiteboard marker and that being in one of the new portables our class was one of the only ones to have whiteboards instead of chalkboards better than I remember this.

Then we actually learned long division.

   10.75

8/86.00

   80

     6 0

     4 6

        4 0

        4 0

          0

Suddenly, the difference made sense. The remainder part of the r meant that it was what remained that wasn't neatly and perfectly divisible by the divisor. I had jumped the gun so to speak.

And that's what I remember about fourth grade math.