This Will Haunt You in Math
Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.
This is the ghost of math that will come back to haunt you forever. It’s math facts, particularly times tables, multiplication tables.
If you don’t memorize those early, then everything afterward, it gets much, much harder than it really needs to be.
I mean, imagine solving a whole algebra problem while you’re spending a bunch of time trying to figure out, like, what is 9 times 6?
That’s only one little part of the problem, and you got a whole bunch of other multiplications to figure out.
So now every algebra problem is really an arithmetic problem, a handful of arithmetic problems, and you just can’t think about the algebra that’s going on ‘cause you’re so focused on these arithmetic problems ‘cause it’s a full brain problem ‘cause you never memorized your math facts!
Every time one of those low-level things comes up, every time a multiplication fact comes up, you gotta stop, turn off your attention to everything that you were doing, and then focus on this one multiplication fact, work it out, and then pick your head up and be like, “What was I doing? Where am I? Oh, right, we’re doing this problem. This is where we left off. What are we trying to do?”
It’s just totally disorienting and you can’t build fluency that way.
Further reading:
Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.