The Rot Starts With Multiplication Tables

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Mathematical rot, it starts early.

It starts with things like, we don’t really need kids to memorize their multiplication tables.

But then, multiplication never becomes an effortless skill.

It always takes up a bunch of space in their brain, and they can’t easily reverse it when it comes time to find factors and other stuff in algebra.

So algebra becomes way harder than it really needs to be.

And because it’s so hard, because students are struggling so much more than they really need to, it gets watered down.

And then we let them lean on calculators and Desmos ‘cause they can’t actually graph things.

They can’t solve things.

They can’t manipulate expressions by hand.

And now there’s a weakness, a big weakness, a widespread weakness in their foundational skills, a rot that’s gonna collapse whatever type of knowledge structure they try to build on top of it.

And this weakness just climbs up the ladder with them.

You don’t fix that in calculus.

You gotta get it at the beginning.

This teaser is distilled from the following posts, if you want to dive deeper:

• Cognitive Science of Learning: Developing Automaticity
• If You Want to Learn Algebra, You Need to Have Automaticity on Basic Arithmetic

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