We’ve looked at the suggested web sites (he likes the googol one) and we’re still reciting the three times table. This weekend when we’ve finally got enough time we’re going to start with the grids, talk a little bit about the concepts, and pick up the library materials.
So he should know them all by Monday, right? 
Did I miss something, or do we not know how old or in what school year he is?
Sorry. It’s his ninth birthday today and he’s in third grade.
This is exactly how I learned them. The 0, 1, 2, 5, 9, 10 and 11 tables were really easy and I skated on learning the rest by just filling in whatever the inbetweeners were. Figuring out the ones I didn’t have memorized didn’t take me an appreciably longer amount of time, I still pased the tests, so I never worried over it.
I did eventually teach myself the rest by rote memorization when I was in my twenties, working a mindless repetitive job with nothing else to do to keep my brain cells from atrophying.
I chanted them, the whole table, 6x4is24, 6x5is30, 6x6is36, up to 9x9is81. Sitting on the school bus, for good measure I chanted all of them, up to 12x12. I just felt like it (this is the hard part from the parent’s point of view). And one by one, over time, I noticed all those nifty little patterns.
My cousin-in-law was out sick for months during the grade where you learn this. When she got back to school, math class got very frustrating–she caught up fine in her other classes, she’s plenty intelligent. But when a multiplication question was thrown to the class, all the others shouted out the answer and she couldn’t. When she asked the teacher, he/she would carefully go over the drawing of four apples wide, six apples long, count them up, and show 24 apples. Joan had no problem with that, but sh couldn’t see how the other kids could get the answer so fast, and had enough months of frustration and feeling stupid that it made her weak in math in general. Eventually she found out that the answer was just, “You memorize it!” (She’s a programmer/systems person now, and no slouch at it.)
See, I think that’s half the answer, or maybe a third of the answer–but it’s the last part of the answer. For me at least it makes much more sense to get as many down by learning rules as you possibly can, and then work on memorization once that’s done with.
Someone that knows the 1x rule can answer any 1x question as quickly as a memorizer. The 9x rule means you’ll answer more slowly than a memorizer.
But if you don’t have them memorized, then the person who knows rules and strategies can get to something like 8x7 far, far faster than the person who memorized the facts but has had a brain-fart and forgotten this one. The memorizer may never be able to get 8x7 without a calculator if she’s forgotten it.
Learn rules, and then memorize on top, and you’ve got the knowledge int he right order: memorized answers readily available, but rules are there for fallback if you’re having difficulty retrieving an answer from memory.
Daniel
My parents used to randomly shout out a times table question (when driving, at the dinner table etc. “What’s 8*6?”) and we’d all jump in to be the first to get the answer. It worked really well for my brother and sisters, but not so much for me.
But I would say this - don’t stress too much if he doesn’t learn them either. My grade 5 (and 6) maths teacher despaired of teaching me my tables - I still have the report card. I went on to win a scholarship to a private secondary school. And then earn an honours degree in engineering (including 3 years of engineering maths subjects in which calculators were banned).
I still don’t know my tables.
When pressed, the trick I use is to go to the nearest easy table (2, 5, 9, 10, 11) and then add. So for example 86 = 85 (easy table) + 8 (or 9*6 - 6). I may not be the quickest on the old times tables, but I get 'em right (eventually)
9 x 5 = 4.50?
If your kid is anything like me or my elder son, you might be best just getting him to memorise them.
He STILL cannot see the patterns, even though it is a year since he learned them. It is clear that though he knows them, he has no mental image whatsoever of what he is doing.
He can do division using the multiplication tables, but if I ask him to draw a picture of what he is doing, or line counters up, he just cries and tells me I’m horrible.
Last night he was doing division with numbers left over, and though he could plough through the problems very slowly, and get them right, he had NO CLUE what he was doing.
On the other hand, he was getting his homework done, and I suppose with luck one day it will click. If I was waiting for him to get the patterns before memorising the tables, he’d be floundering still.
The biggest thing is to not get excited if after a certain period of time he still uses his fingers to calculate. Catholic schoolmarms tried to beat that out of me with little success. To this day (and I’m nearly 30) I use my hands to do math and (this is funny) determine direction.
You know, I could read before I was 1, I could add, subtract, multiply and divide before I even started school, and I still have to think about right and left. It’s funny how that happens. It’s not so funny when you put the wrong shoe on the wrong foot, which I’ve done to my son numerous times.
The point is, it’s more important that he learns how to do it than worrying about the manner in which he does it. It seems babyish, but nobody really cares in the long run.
I was wondering if any was going to notice that.