What Happens When Students Don’t Know Their Math Facts

Without automaticity on multiplication tables, factoring quadratics becomes impossibly slow — and that compounds all the way up to calculus.

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We hear from teachers and chief academic officers and tutors who are so frustrated, getting kids in 6th, 7th, 8th, even 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? If you can’t factor a quadratic, you can’t do algebra.

Even if you do manage to grind through, 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 do in their head in like 10 seconds.

So you’re not going to want to do any problems.

Like, “teacher gave us 4 factoring problems and it took me all night.”

And when you get to calculus, if you’re taking 10 minutes to factor a quadratic, that’s only one component of a calculus optimization problem.

You’re going to be spending half an hour on this problem that should take you a couple minutes.

(Based on discussion with Jason Roberts in Math Academy Podcast 1.)

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