Times Tables by heart?

Shizam Oh how I agree with you. There was a time creativity and arts subjects were prized and well thought of and we produced the best in the fields of art,design, cinema and theatre. They were our forte. Now they are seen as unnecessary mostly I think the result of allowing the bean counters to take over education. There are things you can't examine and test but which pay dividends in adult life.

I am of the generation that had to learn tables by rote and I just couldn't do it! My mother would shout at me and hit me which meant I then couldn't even recite two times tables! I did pass my 11+ and just about managed to scrape through 'O' level maths with the help of the most patient teacher in the world, but I had to devise my own methods of remembering which I still use, based on tricks like turning the numbers round eg I can not do 8X6 but do know the more rhythmic 6 eights are 48. 7X7 = 49 (my brother was born in 1949). For 7x8 it is 49 plus 1 plus 6 (ie 7) which takes you to 56.

This may sound complicated but I do it so quickly no one would know. It is exactly the same with number bonds eg 6 +5 is 5+5 and 1 more = 11. Despite trying for years I cannot learn number sequences though I remember poems and passages of Shakespeare learned in school to this day!!

I became a primary teacher and later worked with children who had learning difficulties and was able to share so many tricks with them. The most successful involved using rhythm and fingers. I don't care what others say - you have fingers why not use them?! If you have poor memory there are other ways than rote learning!

I've been wondering why today's children are going to have to learn up to the 12 times tables. We don't work in dozens anymore. Just shows how much thought the Government have put into this. I also agree with OP schools have never stopped teaching the times tables!

My father bought me a book - The Cheats Times Tables book which showed how to turn tables around. 7 X 8 is the same as 8 X 7 etc, meaning that by the time you get to the nine times table you only need to learn 9 X 9. For someone like me with an appalling memory it was wonderful. It also showed other ways to play with numbers and got me thinking about the logic of them. Didn't help much, girls didn't do maths at my Sec Mod. We did business arithmetic.

I watched a lad in a shop today counting night lights in a box. Nicely packed in neat rows of ten. And he counted them one by one!

I knew them all of my heart at primary school. Failed maths O level despite being at a posh girls' grammar school. The teaching there was simply awful.
When my children were young, we did the times tables walking to school. And that's how I now know them again.
Wish I had had better teachers back in the day, I think maths could be a rather fab subject.
As for grilling them on this and that, some stupid, and I really do mean that word, minister saying our children are lagging behind China in these stakes made me so furious. We should be thinking about creating thinking, happy, creative people. Not dolts that can produce endless facts and statistics.

I had a lot of trouble with tables, which we learned by rote at school, and consequently was hopeless at arithmetic (especially mental arithmetic) and later at maths. Always bottom of the class! I was told i was 'number blind'! Numbers never really slotted into place for me until i joined the Forces and had to do my Army Educational Certificates, at which time something clicked. I've been very grateful that it did, because i've had several jobs that depended on my being able to employ arithmetical and basic maths skills, and i qualified as a book-keeper. I think most people find use for simple multiplication tables throughout their lives. My grandson is eight and knows all his tables to 15x but he told me today they didn't learn them by rote (not sure what method they did use, but it seems to work very well).

At primary age I loved arithmetic and my father sang my times tables with me and taught me a number of useful techniques. Secondary school Maths was a bit of a pain, as whenever I asked "Why this formula?" e.g. quadratic etc, the answer was more or less, "Because I'm older than you and I said so". When I went to training college, we moved onto modern maths, which started to clarify why, but it wasn't till I enrolled with the OU and started studying pure maths and computing that it finally slotted into place! The only problem I experienced was when I first started calculus, which I was put off at my first OU tutorial, where our tutor/cousellor cheered us up no end by telling us that if we had never studied calculus, we were going to find it really difficult, with the inevitable result that we were put off. It wasn't until summer school when a tutor pointed out that it was really easy and explained it in simple terms. I was so pleased that I eventually married him!

Like most I learned the tables by rote and always loved maths. However, I recently realised that I could no longer recall some of them and so have been practicing them - in private. Very worried about this, anyone else have the same problem???

THEY HAVE NEVER STOPPED BEING TAUGHT IN STATE SCHOOLS! Sorry I am shouting but this has been said so many times on this thread, What has stopped is the pointless chanting and learning by rote. Instead a more logical approach is taken -so 2 and 4 times tables are taught together because there is a relationship. I don't think I am dyscalsic. I was just a good little girl who chanted her tables obediently and thought the answer came by some sort of magic. I was a bit over imaginative!

Like most others I learned tables by rote but always loved maths. Very worried lately to find I can't instantly recall answers and so have started practising tables again - in private!

Great for learning difficult spellings, foreign vocab or verb endings, names of capitals, flags, whatever ...etc.

BTW I cut cards out of thin coloured card, about 5cm x 5 cm - put the 'sum' on one side, answer on the other - spread them on table with the 'sums' facing up- pick card, give answer then check- if the answer is correct put in an envelope, if wrong, to the side - and then test those again at the end. Then all back in one envelope with 'title' on ( 9 x table, etc)- and have one envelope for each. After a few days when only a few 'stick' - put those all in a separate envelope together, and keep testing just those. When all ok- separate again into right envelope and test from time to time. It works with most children.

It is an excellent idea. I am 79 and still use them! My granddaughter goes to a private school, she is 10 and they are taught there. I never did understand why this country stopped teaching them in state schools. They are most useful. I do not understand why some of you are opposed to them!

trisher I wonder whether you suffer from some element of dyscalculia, the numeracy form of dyslexia. This occurred to me when I read the following in one of your posts. I never thought of numbers as concrete things simply as symbols like letters...... Hence when it came to doing other things like minus numbers I was a bit lost. Like dyslexia discalculia comes in many forms and levels of severity.

I do, however, think many people have a glass ceiling where maths is concerned. You get to a cetain level and then can get no further no matter how hard you try or how well you know your tables.

Like most people I gave up maths after O level but came back to it when I began some professional training that would have brought me up to 1st year undergraduate level. With the help of DH I scraped through the A level standard work, but without him I would have foundered. But with all his help, I simply could not get any further. He would patiently describe one theorem I had to study. Book in front of us, going down the proof line by line I just about grasped it. Move my eyes to the problem I had to solve and my comprehension disappeared. He did this many times, but I could not understand it for more than 5 seconds. In the end I gave the course up because it was quite clear that I had a mathematical ceiling just above O level and nothing, no matter how hard I tried would really get me any further.

Not read the whole thread- but the school granchildren attend to insist on all children to learn their tables. As GS was struggling with 9 x and 7x I made some cards for him to practise them 'out of order' (eg not chanting) - putting aside all those he got wrong- looking at them again and test himself again on those- and within a few days he'd got them all right.

Being able to calculate things quickly in your head is really useful surely- unlike catechism ;)

lizzy yes you are probably right, could have been because it was never done, possibly I wasn't ready for it or maybe I just zoned out. Whatever the reason I think there is still a possibility of children knowing their tables (as I did) and not understanding. I do think the teaching of maths is important and tables can be a useful tool, but they are not some sort of goal to measure either school or pupil achievement.

You are right, JackyB Thank you. It was right in my first draft - but that disappeared into the wide blue yonder and I had to type it all in again.

We ought to tell them that when we went to school we had to do mental arithmetic involving eggs by the dozen and pounds, shillings and pence!

My latest experience of kids these days not being able to do times tables was when we were in America recently. Still not sure how to ask for petrol at the petrol station, I went in and said I needed about 10 gallons. The boy on the till was totally incapable of even guessing how much that would be in dollars. I worked it out for him.

Here in Germany I am always amazed by the convoluted way they do calculations - I'm usually there ages before they are, simply by dividing bigger numbers into smaller ones and multiplying up larger ones to make the arithmetic simpler. If you've learnt your times tables this is the next step along, surely.

By the way, Elegran, I think you missed a "+1" in point 4) of your explanation. It doesn't make sense otherwise.

*are we

I must confess I haven't read the entire thread so perhaps my question has already been answered, but arcompletely different here in Scotland? Both my 9 year old dgcs know their tables up to 12x, can happily play about with these numbers and calculations, use them in long multiplication/division and understand what they're doing. They're in primary 5 which I think is year 4 in England.

I was more taken aback when dgd announced she had diacritical marking for homework!!

I think there is something in that lizzy. I had a very traditional, even old-fashioned education and I can remember using cowrie shells to help do addition and subtraction, aged 5 and 6. That, along with learning times tables made arithmetic both relatively easy and useful.

Algebra at Grammar School was a different matter - I hated it and have never ever found a use for quadratic equations! Has anybody?

If children don't understand what times tables mean and are confused about number generally, it's because they are rushed through the learning too quickly from the moment they start school. Trisher, if you thought of numbers as abstract, it's likely you had too few opportunities to work with concrete materials in early years and Key Stage 1. Counting, adding and taking away real objects is vital for a young child to learn one-to-one correspondence, more than, fewer than etc. and should not be hurried through.

I hypothesise that (most people'd probably say I have a theory that... ) when people don't remember a useful thing they've learned at school, it's because they haven't had to use it much since learning it and so their knowledge and ability to use it has gone rusty. What I remember of the foreign languages I learned is very rusty—case in point—because I haven't needed to use them much for quite some years.

So I suggest that that young lad, supposedly "quite bright", who went off to get his calculator for a simple sum, didn't do mental arithmetic much as a rule, probably because he didn’t need to in his everyday life, and because he could always resort to a calculator. Even cheap phones have calculators on them nowadays.

I was a teacher for years. As a child I was taught tables by rote so made sure my classes always understood the concept behind times tables and I encouraged a love of number patterns etc. The vast majority knew them all by the end of Year 4 and once learned they stick for life and make solving complex maths problems so much easier.
And its 'fewer' children, not less.
Shall we go on to grammar now............