A question for the math teachers: what’s up with doing times tables as quickly as possible?

I posted this over in r/mathematics but I figured I’d as here too.

What is up with the obsession in elementary/primary schools with “math facts” and being able to regurgitate them as quickly as possible? I mean things like times tables and kids being forced to fill them in under a minute? I remember doing this when I was a kid, and I have never understood why. Obviously they’re testing kids’ memorization skills and not their math skills, right? Or am I missing something?

Coming from a linguistics background, I’ve definitely learned that rote memorization is useless for learning a language. Learning things in context is super important to actually retain them. You could tell with some of my peers in my languages classes that the ones that learned words by memorization can’t really carry ideas and concepts from one topic to another.

I also noticed this in middle and high school. A lot of my classmates had to be taught and retaught concepts from week to week, and even from day to day. So when we’d start on a new topic that builds on the previous topic, they’d have to completely relearn the previous topic. BUT they were good with their times tables which they of course learned by memorization.

So learning, at least for me, in context would be having students learn the basics of addition, then learn multiplication as an extension of addition, then subtraction as an extension of addition, then division as an extension of subtraction. Logically speaking, this would bring them closer to understanding what’s going on and how numbers work faster, right?

Anyway, am I just looking too much into the idea of memorization? Or is it really as bad for teaching people (specifically children) mathematics as I think? Also, are my ideas of the “best” way to teach mathematics on the right track?

Submitted November 08, 2020 at 01:22PM by notAnotherJSDev https://ift.tt/38nixkE