The Beeb carries a story that is, to anyone who has struggled with rote learning, a statement of the blindingly obvious.
Primary school pupils can do well at maths even if they do not know simple sums by heart, research suggests.
I struggled with the subject as a child. At that time, we were expected to learn our times tables by rote. If you learn that way, all well and good. If you don’t, then tough. I just couldn’t. I don’t learn that way. For me to absorb something, I have to understand the concept. It’s no good telling me that something “just is”, so get on and learn it. I forget. If I understand the why and the how then the concept sticks and I can recall and use it in different contexts. If I can use it in a practical example, then it embeds itself permanently. I struggled with trigonometry for years until one day a teacher used an example of designing and building a roof. The penny dropped. So now I understand why those triangles work the way they do – and Pythagoras remains etched into my brain because I’ve had to mark out right angles in the same way that the ancient Egyptians did. It’s the way my mind works. I am a pragmatist. The important lesson here is that we all learn differently. Rote works for some people, but it doesn’t work for everyone, so is not a suitable method for those folk.
I struggled to get beyond my two times tables as a child, yet these days I find myself having to explain basic mathematical principles to people half my age with university degrees (why do they find percentages so difficult?). I still cannot recite my times tables. I don’t need to. I understand the underlying principles that make numbers work.
But the Institute of Education study suggests children succeed when they understand number concepts.
See?
IDEAS and their practical applications … matter.
Yet some so-callled “educationalists” don’t want to see that.
Why?
One thing solved my number issues DARTS!
Working in a pub did wonders for my mental addition and subtraction.
Same as Bill , Darts in our house along with pontoon when younger and moving on to Cribbage. normally played for small stakes out of pocket money as Grandad said ‘If you’ve nothing to win or lose you won’t concentrate’ he had no shame in taking money off a child (we always got it back in other ways though)
Then as with you Longrider 2 years working in a pub rammed it home. Before all these fancy tills, when the prices were dymo taped to the pumps and you had to keep a running total in your head.
For the same reason I always struggled with chemistry but not maths and physics, however it is also true that knowing my times tables is a real boon.
I don’t recall them being particularly hard to learn, mind you it was a longish time ago…
I’ve always been utterly hopeless at maths, like you I just don’t get a thing if I cant understand why it’s the way it is, so equations were always a complete mystery ( still are ) because for the life of me I just don’t see how or why they work, I never had a problem with percentages though, that seems a very simple concept and I can’t grasp why it flummoxes quite a lot of other people. I was never very good at arithmetic either but the thing that largely cured that was working as a bus conductor when I was eighteen, possibly the best job I ever had, although that may just be nostalgia for a long ago youth.