Race to the algorithm

This might be a little bit of a rant, but I'm going to try to keep it calm.
My bugbear is division algorithms.  It's not that I can't do them - I'm very good at them - but I'm constantly frustrated by the fixation people have with teaching them to students waaaaaay before they're ready for them.

I know that sometimes it is in response to parents showing up on the classroom doorstep wanting to know when or how you're going to teach them (or why you're not doing so at the moment), and sometimes it is because we think it's going to show our colleagues how clever our class is and what a great maths teacher we are.

But division algorithms really must wait until students have a good grounding in multiplicative number sense, and plenty of experience of sharing and dividing objects, amounts and numbers in concrete ways.  Otherwise our students will leave our classrooms carrying a maths mental block and the feeling that they are no good at it because they can't do "guzinters" properly.

Leave the algorithms until your students are securely at stage 6, ladies and gentlemen, please.  If you try to teach them before the students are ready the best you can hope for is a child who can perform the algorithm but does not understand what they're doing or why.  The more common occurrence is a child who is completely baffled and feels that they're somehow at fault for not being able to do it.