What Happens When Students Don’t Know Their Math Facts
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As Jason Roberts explained in an earlier podcast:
We hear from teachers and chief academic officers and tutors who are so frustrated.
They’re getting kids in 6th, 7th, 8th, 10th grade who are still finger counting!
High schoolers, finger counting.
They don’t know their multiplication tables.
How the heck are you gonna factor a quadratic when you don’t know your multiplication tables?
You can’t do it, not really.
And then guess what?
You can’t factor a quadratic, you can’t do algebra.
And even if you do manage to grind through just finger counting into oblivion, it’s gonna take you way too long.
It’s gonna take you like 10 minutes to factor, which some kids can just do in their head in like 10 seconds.
So you’re not gonna wanna do any problems.
Like, “Teacher gave us 4 factoring problems and it took me all night.
It’s so unfair.” Like, come on. And when you get to calculus, if you’re taking 10 minutes to factor a quadratic, and that’s only one component of a calculus optimization problem, you’re gonna be spending half an hour on this problem that should take you a couple minutes.
Further reading:
- What Happens When Students Don’t Know Their Math Facts
- If You Want to Learn Algebra, You Need to Have Automaticity on Basic Arithmetic
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