Times table to be learnt at Primary School

Learning whole tables 'parrot fashion' to 12x is pointless if all you are doing is making sounds without understanding number patterns. That's 144 lines of 'poetry' memorised if you ever succeed in this.  Also, what's the point of learning 8x6 if you already know 6x8? Understanding the role and relationship between multiplier, multiplicand and product is far more useful, less of a chore and easier. You then have the division tables as a bonus!

 

very good post, fully agree

if some pupil's when at school like me didn't really see the point of learning  things and would rather be out exploring the great outdoors ,and then when I left school I realised what a huge mistake I had made for not taking notice of what I was told , so it must be difficult for teachers today to make learning interesting and keep the kids focused 

 P.S , are you back to stay Corners??

If I compared the type of early maths education I had..eg how many bucketfuls of coal would fill a bath at a rate of whatever ....to the computer programming and advanced maths that is being learnt now, I think we should be pleased with our teachers and their students. (I never quite "got" the relevance of the bath bit and I think I might have enjoyed the computer bit!)

I agree Brue. I would love to be a child today learning computer programming. I've dived into it later in life and it's much more interesting that Pythagoras's Theorem or Sines, Cosines and Logarithms ever were!!

In your opinion. However I would rather be doing Pythagoras and algebra than computing. We are not all the same.

Yep! Just my opinion and my preferences!

And I still know my times tables!!!

Cheers

Bugs

Me too! 

You can test yourselves on www.mathsisfun.com 

We seemed to be a country of ‘mangers’ ...

Not until next December now. 

That comment" We seem to be a Country of Managers." is so true, yet it is so daft!

Take the Police Force:

The Good old Beat Officer, Or Beat PC, is now the "beat manager"

The vital Sergeant has become the "Shift manager"

The Inspector  "the Sector manager"

It reminds me of when i made a welfare visit to my Old Chief Constable, who (by then in his eighties) said to me  "Brian, - I fear for the Police Service today, they are all calling themselves managers!  Who the bloody hell's leading?  So True!

The Fire brigade,s gone the same way, they don't fight fires any more, they just manage them.

Have we all gone management Mad?

TF

Children need to be taught to manage their own learning and take ownership of it. Not force fed, rote learnt, parrot 'noises' which are devoid of real understand and facination.

There are some wonderul computer programs which help understanding and recall which are fun! Calculators can also be used creatively to assist this process. It's not always the end product, pardon the pun, that's important but how you get there! 

Rote learnt maybe, but I still remember the today, - 65 years later, and they help me many times a week!

TF