How on EARTH do you teach the times tables!?

[Boco]

dd is year 2, her homework is learning the 2x tables. Easy, she can say 2, 4, 6, 8 10 etc. But if you say what is 2x8 she looks blank and says 'what do you mean?'.

I can't seem to be able to explain the concept of TIMESing - I've been saying two lots of, which I thought might help, but she's not getting it. I've shown her a number grid, i've drawn two lots of cakes, four lots of two cakes, six lots two cakes etc - i've written them all down and tried just getting her to memorize - finally I've tried collapsing exasperated as she shouts 'I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!'

How how how how how?

Try downloading the free Timez Attack program.

chant them#
over and over again
everywhere

You're clearly not unbelievably thick, 100x; you're very witty and eloquent. You do also, curiously, have a name that's part of a multiplication table. Is this intentional?

If your DS1 likes maths, he might like 'The Number Devil'. It's quite interesting, though I don't think I'll remember much about it. The last chapter had lots of reproducing rabbits.

I like the rabbits!

No, but you see that's the mystery. DS2 a most articulate and winning person, but somehow neither of us can get our otherwise perfectly active and informed brains to take up basic maths. Is a mystery to me too. And honestly, I was still taking my maths o'level when I was doing my A'levels and at this point was considered to be really quite smart.

DS1 helping though. When he was Y2 he explained to me how to add up big numbers by rounding them up to the nearest ten. YOU SEE. How can I not have known how to do that? Let's put it down to bad teaching. Shall we? I shall take comfort in that.

Oh and sorry Boco. I have a habit of coming on maths threads and talking about how confusing it all is - WHICH IS NOT HELPFUL AT ALL. Apols.

I have a good friend, now a lawyer, who read history at Oxford, and is a very smart and literary guy, who failed his maths 0-level something like 3 times. I don't think he ever passed it.

Brains, eh?

I meant how interesting that people's brains were all so differently wired, rather than just that he had a lot of them, which is also clearly true.

Yes, agree.

I just downloaded Timez attack - its good isn't it! dd is off school today as she's not well - and it was going well until the bit where you have to answer the questions really fast or the troll hits you - and she burst into tears.

Maybe when she's feeling better.

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Yes, I'm with bloss and the pro-rote group. It's not instead of understanding, it's getting it into them anyway and not waiting.

I'd be interested to know how old the people are who don't know their times tables. When I was at school (creak) it was gently hammered into us, we didn't question it, just chanted it. No homework, no worksheets, regular primary school, pretty poor northern area. We all knew them, however bright we were or not. It was just inside us. You didn't have to be bright to know your times tables.

Absolutely bloss. At A-level psych we learnt the definition of a standard deviation by heart. Our teacher said not to bother trying to understand it, just learn the definition and how to calculate them, and when we'd done enough of them we'd understand the concept behind them. Spot on. When I did my degree, there were a lot of people who'd not done the stats at A-level. I said the same thing to them. By the end of the first year, no one had a problem understanding it.

Sometimes you just have to learn by rote. (And small children's brains are not necessarily developed enough, and they often do not have enough experience behind them, to understand the concept first.

Oh look it's swung back in favour of rote. That's good - though our rote learning was driven much more by necessity than design. I am nearly 40 and do not know what 7x8 is, though I did rote learning too.

I don't know how anyone does the 9x table on their fingers. I am quite good on the smaller ones. We listen to a cassette in the car sometimes, but ds2 and I always prefer to play the bit at the beginning which goes

Numbers all around!

Numbers all around!

in quite a manic way, and makes us laugh.

I do actually need to leave this thread now.

Unless it's 56, is it 56?

OMG. It is [punches air] I take that back

I think it's 56.

I rote learned all my times tables at school and like others still remember them. My Mum used to write them out and stick them on the kitchen cupboards to help. Possibly not an interior design trick that's going to catch on...

We did do stuff at school with groups of matches though so I 'got' the concept too. Having said all that i'm shite at Maths in general and never understand anything more advanced but I can usually do the numbers on Countdown which makes me feel smug.

There is nothing wrong with practising by rote. We regularly chant them aloud, back and forth and write them out over and over. The problem is that if children only learn by rote with the assumption that they'll understand later then their entire grasp of primary numeracy hangs in the balance. Learning long multiplication/division very much hinges on understanding what multiplication actually is. To understand fractions they need to understand multiplication and division too. So much rests on understanding those four basic functions.

The idea that you must learn by rote to equip yourself with quick recall is only really necessary in adulthood. For a 6/7/8yr old, being able to understand that 5x9 is actually 5 lots of 9 is far more important.

Example Child A when asked what 6x9 is says 53. However, her working shows that she knows it must be less than 60 (6x10) but more than 48 (6x8) So she has taken 9 from 60 (1 less lot 6) and got 53. The fact that she has got 53 instead of 54 doesn't matter at this stage. Of course it matters as she progresses but her understanding and mathematical thought process matter more. She has made a silly subtracting error.

Child B gives answer 54. Her working shows her write out 6x1=6, 6x2=12 etc. She hasworked through the rote learning on paper. Fine if she actually has the same understanding as Child A but if not, then she is the child who willstruggle with every aspect of numeracy.

bloss - I think we will have to agree to disagree on this one!
However, you have now really just confirmed my point! Students at university really struggle with the concepts behind maths. They struggle with this as they have never questioned why anything is the way it is. Why have they never questioned anything? Because throughout their whole education they have been encouraged to just learn stuff. Even if you do question things at A' level, the teacher will quite often not know (because they probably didn't even study maths at uni!) and even if they do know, they quite often say it's too complicated for you to understand at this point. I'm sure they could at least give you an idea in terms you can comprehend.
Separating the variables for example, was explained by treating the Leibniz notation as a fraction... but it isn't a fraction!
Also, by the age of 15, I was quite capable of finding ways around the fact that I didn't know my tables by heart and it certainly has never taken me 10 minutes to work out 6x7!!! I would have said that 3x7=21, then 2x21=42 and that took very little time! I do know some of them, but this is only from picking them up over the years.

blueskyandsunshine - I'm 24, and our year was the 'discovery' year at primary school - we were meant to discover things for ourself rather than being taught properly!

My ds "gets it". And because he gets it, he would rather sit and work out the bloody answer in his head, which takes ages, rather than learn by rote. Drives me bonkers. And his maths teacher too.

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You see, I think learning by rote helps the kids who are rubbish at maths, because it at least gives them half a chance. Understanding can come at different times: certainly it comes at different times for more and less able children. But chanting by rote.. well, that works pretty much in the earliest years, before you are really questioning much at all. It just gets stuck in there, like left and right, or washing your hands, or saying please and thank you. We knew them all by six or seven, and no one was traumatised by it. I don't know why anyone minds really. It's not like some great restriction on your freedom of learning.

I have no idea where I wrote that I was told to shut up and learn it off by heart(?)
When doing GCSEs in maths and science you are given formula after formula to learn. Are you seriously telling me that teachers can and do explain where each formula comes from?
I asked my maths teacher during year 11 where the quadratic formula came from. She said noone had ever asked that before, and that it was too complicated to explain. It was not too complicated. We had already done factorisation, and I'm sure completing the square wasn't out of my scope tbh!
I have other friends at uni with similar experiences at school. One of my friends' maths teacher studied biology at university, and hadn't a clue, apparently.
But as I said (a few posts up!), it is the whole education system that is flawed. It is exam and target driven and children aren't given the oppotunity to think for themselves. Too much is expected of them too young, and they get in the habit of just trying to get through the next test/exam and don't learn anything long term.
Teachers actively encourage going through realms of past exam papers to get an idea of what will be on the exam, and the focus is on getting through with a decent grade, rather than learning something properly.

blueskyandsunshine - I wouldn't mind people rote learning if everyone did understand it eventually, but some people never do. How are you meant to assess whether a child understands how to multiply or not, if they know all the answers?

Trumpetgirl, your last paragraph is exactly what I was talking about in my earlier post.

Blueskyandsunshire, why does it have to be in isolation. Why do you seem to think that by giving children the understanding we deny them the chance to practise rote type chanting. In primary classrooms up and down the country they are being taught/used hand in hand.

Well everyone's not going to understand are they? It's just a fact of life. My dh can calculate a petrol bill or currency conversion but he can't understand the quadratic formula even though he knows it. He can function. He functioned well enough through school to achieve a C in Maths (later getting an exhibition at Cambridge -- not in maths) and can now handle all the maths that life ever throws at him. Because he just learned the basics by heart when he was little enough for it not to bother him. So what are you going to do? Abandon the children who aren't good at maths to a hinterland of confusion and troubled effort? Or give them a chance?

total hijack of op

am glad you are not worried boco and I hope it all works out

ps agree cardigan, both at once, why not