Fractions and Decimals for the Dummy Fifth Grader

relationship of a fraction to a decimal number

There used to be, and for all we know, still is, a  television show called "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?" The premise, obviously, is that ten-year-olds know stuff grownups have forgotten, although let's be real: a lot of the adult contestants seemed to be rather... clueless the few times we watched it. While today's DotD candidate may not be clueless, however, he certainly is verbose. By our count, it took Damarious Page 499 words to explain "How to Change Fractions into Decimals"¹ for Sciencing.com [that name: ptui!!]. We think it should have taken fewer than twenty...

Page managed to pad out his answer by a factor of almost 25 (that's 400 / 20, if you're curious) with such rubbish as his introduction,

"Fractions provide graspable [sic] mathematical--and visual--cues for the parts that make up a whole. Fractions are present in everyday life in things like pizza pie or cake cut into equal slices."

We couldn't let that stupidity pass without mentioning that 1) "pizza pie" is redundant and no one ever said that fractions have to represent "equal" parts of a whole. But if you need 75 words, you start getting silly... Page then goes on to explain how to "Convert a Simple Fraction to a Decimal," a process he says entails five friggin' steps, from "Write the fraction in the top left-hand corner of your paper" to "Write the problem and the final solution, the value from your calculator screen..." all of which could easily have been condensed to "divide the numerator by the denominator" or, if you don't want to use big words, "divide the top number by the bottom number."

But Damarious wasn't done yet, no sirree Bob. He also explained "Convert a Mixed Fraction to a Decimal" (eight steps this time) and for even more gild on this particular lily, "Use Long Division to Convert a Fraction to a Decimal" for another six steps.

Now, we will grant that Page's examples are correct – what moron can't get 0.5 as the decimal equivalent of 1/2 – but 500 words? lengthy explanations of both long division (in which he attempts to explain using the "tableau sign" that no one has ever seen called a "tableau sign") and of using a TI calculator... let's hope none of his readers are using an engineering calculator from HP...

As we said before, Damarious didn't exactly get anything wrong, but we still think anyone who deliberately expands an answer that could have been given in eight words to almost 500 is certainly deserving of some kind of award, and the one that we give out is called the Dumbass of the Day.  We might have held off on the award if he'd said anything about repeating decimals, not nooooo....

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. The URL was  ehow.com/how_2308227_change-fractions-decimals.html

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