Students Need To Memorize Math Facts

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When students don’t memorize math facts, it creates friction that slows down their thinking and execution indefinitely into the future.

It’s easy to believe/hope you’ll internalize the math facts by re-computing/rederiving them when needed, but what typically happens is you only internalize the process, not the fact.

The way you memorize math facts is by practicing recalling them – and recalling/executing a procedure to obtain a fact is not the same as recalling the fact itself.

For the vast majority of kids, memorizing basic math facts is not a big ask. Math education is a weird world where people fight wars against the mathematical equivalent of learning to tie one’s shoes. Like, it’s obviously super useful and it’s not that freaking hard! Just do it!

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