We apologise for the lack of posting. Things have been busy and we’ve been at work on some fiddly posts. But here’s a brief one.
Commenter Dr. Mike alerted us to a little ruckus going on in the UK. As recently reported in the Sunday Telegraph, and then the Times, British teacher unions are going to war with the multiplication tables:
Stop testing children on times tables, unions tell ministers
The times table tests should become optional,” said a union source. “We are not saying children shouldn’t learn times tables. They are really helpful. But the need to have the times table check is a bit of an unnecessary waste of time.
So, the tables are “really helpful” but the testing should of them should be “optional”. Somehow it feels like their heart really isn’t in it.
From here across the seas, it is difficult to know exactly what is going on. The basis of it all appears to be a joint statement, seemingly concocted by the NEU and signed onto by “several education experts”. That statement was released a month ago, however, and the news reports from a couple days ago contain nothing much new except for the anti-tables headlines. So, it seems to be simply a campaign to pressure Bridget Phillipson, Education Secretary in the new Labour government, with the multiplication tables a key target. It is unclear whether the Telegraph reporter instigated the campaign or is just a compliant patsy. In any case, it is all nuts. It would be a lot easier to be sympathetic to teachers if their representatives were not so consistently stupid.
Finally, a quick reminder that we have previously posted a simple message to primary schools in regard to the multiplication tables. Seemingly, there are some teachers who still need to take it on board.
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Not only the times tables, here is a list of things in math that the schools (from primary school to high school) actively have discouraged, or teachers at various points have conveyed strictly (to me as a parent) as “unnecessary” (or worse, you are “pressurizing” your child too much):
1. Times Tables
2. Long division
3. Early introduction of algebra (even when the child was happily, fully, more than ready)
4. Exams (throughout primary school, and for most of high school – instead there were only assessments, which test only the last couple of chapters taught. The kids never build bridges and aha moments between topics and branches)
5. Bridges between physics/science and mathematics. So much, so much beauty is lost there for children.
6. Expecting students to “remember” formulae during assessments – instead a formula sheet is provided. Imagine trying to look at a problem where you need to detect the “hidden pattern” (e.g. sin 2\theta = 2 sin\theta*cos\theta), and checking all of the trig formulae in the formula sheet to check which one applies, instead of the crime of “rote learning” ensuring that you have memorised and worked with the formula to extent that you may immediately look at a problem and instinctively “know” which one to use. Imagine the crime!
7. “Learning” derivations for formulae
8. Doing small “proofs” from a very early age – even visual, geometric proofs – so that later, the capacity to do geometric or algebraic proofs is really poorly developed.
The times tables are just the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps we could just point them all to the “1729” story – since “play-based” storytelling activities in learning are now so important, perhaps they could learn from that “story”?
Thanks, SS. Of course I agree. But I think there is a particularly important point about the multiplication tables: if we cannot agree on the necessity of the tables then we cannot agree on anything. And, as it stands, we cannot agree on the tables.
Yes, true! 🙁
Really don’t want to move this discussion into political direction, but this government so far just destroys. The most dangerous people are energetic idiots.
A self-contradictory and idiotic comment.
A couple of comments from someone in the ivory tower and an erstwhile parent and grandparent who has occasionally been turned loose among the young. In a healthy environment, children like to know and do stuff and are proud of it. This includes tying their shoelaces, skating, riding a bicycle, sports statistics, beating their parents at checkers, counting, reciting the alphabet, etc. and yes, knowing the times table. Some of this requires patience and diligence voluntarily given. In particular, mathematics has the advantage of having a lot of neat stuff that a kid with some basic skills can tap into, and it would be nice in the formation of teachers that the cadets get exposed to some of it. It would also help for them to learn good formal and informal evaluation techniques and the ability to recognize and support talent (not easy, because it is sometimes difficult for an ordinary teacher to appreciate when some kid makes an interesting comment or asks a deep question; a kid may be bright but not articulate).
In the age of the dinosaurs, regular testing in public schools occurred as a matter of routine in the classroom by the teacher, sort of like checking under the fingernails for dirt or going through the hair for cooties. (There were no state tests – zilch – until Grade 13.) In other words, it was not generally a traumatic experience for both kids and teachers. In this way, they had a lot of useful stuff under their fingertips, like being able to spell, knowing basic geographical, historical and political facts about their countries, and how to negotiate commercial transactions.
I could not be bothered to wade through the manifestos referenced by Marty. Let us just keep the stress for both the kids and the teachers to a minimum, and most of the time, things will work out just fine. In the schools that “work” that I have visited, the key seems to be a corps of teachers that work well together along with an attentive and supportive principal. Examples provided on request.
Thanks, Ed. Your second paragraph is key, and why your third paragraph is problematic.
As you note, it used to be absolutely routine to be tested in primary school, all the damn time, every week if not every day. It was important, and students cared, but no one test was all *that* important. But what was really important, what was behind it all, was the expectation and the effective demand that kids learn stuff. That is simply no longer true, at least in Australia.
In almost every primary school, there is no such testing. Absolutely none. And perhaps there is a way to expect/demand primary kids learn without such testing but if there is, it’s not being implemented. There is simply no expectation, much less a demand, that primary kids learn. Some will, some won’t, but it is all optional. This is insane.
So what is a government to do? What is required is a proper culture of teaching and learning and testing, but a government cannot readily manufacture a culture. Maybe. Tony Gardiner disagreed, except perhaps for the “readily”, pointing out that Singapore did exactly this. But it sure as hell isn’t easy. But at least, as a starting point, a government can impose the very minimal expectations, such as ten year olds knowing their goddam times tables.
Having government imposed testing is absurdly clumsy. But as long as teachers and their cretinous ITE lecturers and their cretinous unions continue to not give a damn, it is the best and the only way forward.
I don’t question for a second the overall sentiment you’ve expressed here regarding the importance of knowing your times tables.
But I would quibble with this part of your “simple message”: “If your students are not learning their multiplication tables, up to 12, by heart, then you are fucking up.”
The 12’s are not needed for any of the multi-digit algorithms, and to my knowledge have not generally been taught in non-English-speaking (i.e. historically metric) countries, even during past periods when standards in school math have been impressively high there. I’m sure that for good students, some of the more common multiples of 12 eventually seep in, in the same way that the more numerate among us will know the squares of 15, 16 or 25. But knowing them is not considered an explicit objective in itself for schools.
On the other hand, there were 12 pence in a shilling, and there are 12 inches in a foot. So there was certainly at one time a good rationale for knowing the 12’s in Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand (and perhaps even up to 20 x 12, there being 20 shillings in a pound). Now, though, insisting on the 12’s has the appearance to me of fetishizing one unimportant detail about the way things happened to be back when overall standards were higher.
I presume you disagree with my take, so it would be interesting to hear your counterarguments.
Well, we still have dozens, and minutes and seconds and hours, and degrees. So the 12x table is hardly esoteric. But the real point is that we want a good stock of multi-factor numbers at our fingertips, for the proper practise of factorising and fraction arithmetic. One would hope that 24 and 60 and 72 and all the other multiples of 12 are being employed all the time. Which is really hard to do in a smooth manner if the kids don’t know the 12x table.
I agree that tables up to 12 are not necessarily necessary, in the way that tables up to 10 are. But they’re very very close.
I take your point. Still, I’m not sure how I would rank 7 x 12, 9 x 12 or 11 x 12 compared to, say, 4 x 15 or 5 x 16. There are many examples at this level, and the demarcation line for me between essential and desirable is up to 10 x 10.
And I take your point, and your examples are good. If there were a more general emphasis on prime factorisation then the specific emphasis on 12x would largely be redundant. But there definitely isn’t and so it definitely isn’t.