You'll find suggestions for how to participate in the Math Forum, starting points for searching and browsing our site, and pointers to useful material elsewhere on the Internet, including "The New Homework," an article that presents family activities designed to help children identify reliable Internet sources, notice bias, resist propaganda, and develop their own independent ideas based on research. From the February 1997 edition of FromNowOn.Org: The Educational Technology Journal.
When I went to school about umpteen zillion years ago back sometime before the pyramids, I recall a longhand-division-and-guess method used to determine square roots, at least until we ran out of papyrus. Nowadays, the only answer I can seem to find is, "Well, you hit this button on the calculator..."
We have some good answers to this dilemma in our archives, where we organize topics about which we receive questions. While you're waiting for Dr. Math to answer it's always worth searching the archives, which you can do from the link in the top menubar of our archive pages. Here are a few responses to get you started: