Today's demand for precision, not that it's often fulfilled, certainly reaches beyond the 2-3 place accuracy of the typical slide-rule. Teaching arithmetic has always been troublesome. Multiplication was taught by memorization, since Booth's algorithm was a bit too tedious, even for the teachers. Division started to look like number theory, and teachers were afraid of that, too, so they overly simplified it. It worked, though, hence we old-timers actually know how to divide numbers using pencil and paper. I say PENCIL, rather than pen, since we tend to make mistakes.

In all the time I spent learning arithmetic, I was never taught that division was simply a means of determining how many times one number could subtracted from another. This notion was "danced-around" but never clarified. It wasn't until I was in college that this was demonstrated.

Teaching the kids how a slide rule works requires they have a basic knowledge of how one uses logarithms. Explaining log's and exponentiation to an 8-year-old is outside my expertise.

When my kids were in public school, yes, they were taught the "old way."

RE