Whose brilliant idea was this?

Why would you try to introduce long division in the last two weeks of third grade? No one's up for much of anything new, much less such a difficult concept like long division. And is anyone going to remember it after summer vacation? I doubt it. Duh.

Alyssa brought home two pages of homework on long division (one with two digit quotients, one with three digit) and much crying and yelling commenced. It was not pleasant. I can't understand how something where you just have to repeat the same actions over and over, no matter how big the number is, can cause such angst. Her approach to doing something like long division apparently is to just guess at what to do next. Hmm, here are some numbers, I guess I should just randomly multiply two of them and then subtract the result from some other randomly selected numbers. Um, yeah, that's not going to work. And it doesn't help when the multiplication tables are still just a wee bit shaky.

But this morning all is well! She appears to have finally gotten it! She finished up her homework with no crying and very few mistakes. Now if she can just keep that knowledge in her brain for her test on Tuesday. But I'm almost positive it will be gone as soon as the test is over and we'll have the same scene next year when they get around to learning it again.