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Lately, I have been on the front lines of education; working as a tutor for students, who are long-shots to pass the upcoming State Standards in Mathematics. My general observation is that most of the students do not have an elementary (school) understanding of even the basic operations.
With the risk of this turning into a flash card or no flash card debate, I will say that is the way I learned the "times tables" and I couldn't forget them if I wanted to. The students will not be allowed to use calculators on the exam. By the time negative integers are introduced, only 20% are able to keep up.
Somebody sure did fail these students.
Lately, I have been on the front lines of education; working as a tutor for students, who are long-shots to pass the upcoming State Standards in Mathematics. My general observation is that most of the students do not have an elementary (school) understanding of even the basic operations.
With the risk of this turning into a flash card or no flash card debate, I will say that is the way I learned the "times tables" and I couldn't forget them if I wanted to. The students will not be allowed to use calculators on the exam. By the time negative integers are introduced, only 20% are able to keep up.
Somebody sure did fail these students.
No, my friend...someone DIDN'T fail these students.
That's the problem.
I've noticed there has been a strong push to teach children how to problem solve instead of memorization. I don't know if I completely agree with in because I don't see the harm in memorizing multiplication facts.
I agree. I've been working with 8th graders and they struggle to do the arithmetic involved with learning the math.
When they struggle with multiplication and division the higher level math goes out the window and never gets learned.
Even if they were allowed to use calculators on the exam, many problems would require entering 10+ calculations. There is clearly a need to be swift with arithmetic in solving many Algebra applications.
No, my friend...someone DIDN'T fail these students.
That's the problem.
Or they were failed and the parents pushed to get them socially passed. I've seen it too many times in my school.
My daughter is in 2nd grade and they are doing multiplication. They use songs to memorize their facts, they have a different song for each math fact, doubles, 3's, 4's, 5's, 6's, etc....
Lately, I have been on the front lines of education; working as a tutor for students, who are long-shots to pass the upcoming State Standards in Mathematics. My general observation is that most of the students do not have an elementary (school) understanding of even the basic operations.
With the risk of this turning into a flash card or no flash card debate, I will say that is the way I learned the "times tables" and I couldn't forget them if I wanted to. The students will not be allowed to use calculators on the exam. By the time negative integers are introduced, only 20% are able to keep up.
Somebody sure did fail these students.
As a physics student with other friends in the hard sciences/maths courses I have to say in the end it doesn't matter. Most of the friends from what you would term "highschool" never remembered there timetables if they even learnt them in elementary school and got the best grades in maths and flew through there college maths. So being able to solve a problem is far better for your use later on. Still I'd say multiplication tables are useful to learn but by golly no ones failed you if you don't know them all off by heart. There is far more that can be done with hard work.
No, my friend...someone DIDN'T fail these students.
That's the problem.
This is exactly the problem.
Here in the High School where I work Algebra 1 is the lowest (math) class on campus. Yet a very high percentage of students do not pass this class. Rather, I should say, they pass but do not know anything... Why?
Partly because of "appearances." You can show that a certain number of students "passed" algebra and went on to say, geometry, but in actuality the kids retain very little, if any knowledge.
If we really cared about students we'd bring back pre-algebra in high school, and get the kids to actually understand something.
And this is just one example out of many.
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I've seen it too many times in my school. 
