And between the mathematical mind of Michael, who counted to five, and the mind of the ancient black at Tulagi, who counted sticks of tobacco in units of five, was a distance shorter than that between Michael and Dag Daughtry who could do multiplication and long division. In the same manner, up the same ladder of mathematical ability, a still greater distance separated Dag Daughtry from Captain Duncan, who by mathematics navigated the Makambo.

One afternoon (I had then been three weeks at Lowood), as I was sitting with a slate in my hand, puzzling over a sum in long division, my eyes, raised in abstraction to the window, caught sight of a figure just passing: I recognised almost instinctively that gaunt outline; and when, two minutes after, all the school, teachers included, rose en masse, it was not necessary for me to look up in order to ascertain whose entrance they thus greeted.

Students graduating from elementary school are entering high school not knowing their fractions, decimals, long division and number facts, such as multiplying and dividing using one and zero.

Then we found some of the teachers did not know how to do long division. Now we have calculators but even with that, the teachers need to know how to do their long division.

So being in charge of a class of 30 of them, day in day out, and actually having to not just holler at them for six hours, but nurture them, look after their wellbeing and teach them long division and what the capital of Norway is, is an unfathomably awesome skill.

By age 4, he said, they enrolled her for English classes at a private school near their home and she was learning multiplication tables and long division at home.

But this wasn't an underpressure 11-year-old struggling to get to grips with long division, this was a 47-year-old woman.

"Yes, of course I know how to do long division," I would say in a sing-song voice when she came home with a tough maths worksheet.

This article does not propose to discuss the origins of the method for long division of polynomials known to many as synthetic division, nor to discuss whether it should be known as Horner's method as ascribed to William Horner by Augustus De Morgan (Robertson & O'Connor, 2005) or as some cousin of the Chinese remainder theorem developed by Qin Jiushao (Joseph, 2011).

Vinyl Tap on John William Street will take three of their favourite acts to Wakefield's Long Division Festival on June 11 to play on their new sponsored stage.

The examples and exercises allow students to practice such operation as factoring, expanding a power of a binomial, completing the square, synthetic and long division, rationalization, and solving inequalities and equations in situations similar to those they will encounter in calculus.