Math Fact Fluency Matters — Memorization Is Not Old-Fashioned

Here's why it's so important for students to memorize their multiplication tables.

There's a lot of opposition to this idea in education today that students should have to memorize their math facts.

But if we look at Bloom's taxonomy, we can quickly understand why it's so important for students to memorize their math facts.

But notice that Bloom's taxonomy is not a ranking.

It is not a list in order of importance or quality when we see this pyramid.

You've seen the pyramid with knowledge at the bottom going all the way up to analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Bloom's taxonomy is not telling us that knowledge is the worst and least important of these.

It's telling us, see the pyramid, it's telling us that knowledge is the foundation.

If you want students to do higher order work, they have to have that lower level foundation of knowledge and comprehension.

And nowhere is that more true than with math facts.

So I was really excited to see this article in Edutopia called, Should More Time Be Spent Learning Math Facts?

You can read that at principalcenter.com slash facts, or just Google the title.

And I love how this article goes into depth and incites many education researchers and professors in schools of education who talk about the importance of math facts, which frankly, as practicing educators, we don't really like that much.

Educators hate math facts because they seem boring to us.

It seems tedious and it seems kind of mean to make students memorize their math facts.

But read some of these quotes in this article.

If you know those multiplication and division facts, things like reducing fractions, get a lot easier.

And we call these dirty words, drill and practice, or we actually prefer the phrase drill and kill in education.

It feels like we're murdering our students and we're torturing them by making them learn their math facts, but that is not the case.

These are evidence-based strategies that work and especially getting students up to fluency with their math facts is one of the most important things that we can do to help them succeed at higher level math.

So I think we've got to stop talking about drill and kill in such a negative way practice for fluency is essential it is not traumatizing and like granted you can do anything in a better or worse way you know there are bad ways to practice there are ways of doing good things in a mean way that we should avoid you know we can do a good job of this but if we were to skip entirely the endeavor of making students memorize their math facts, I think we would be doing students a huge disservice.

And the article even makes the connection to phonics, right?

Like teaching phonics is kind of unpleasant.

It's kind of a drag to teach phonics, and it seems a little bit regressive.

Like, oh, why are we making students use flashcards and do all these old fashioned things?

Well, it turns out that a lot of students absolutely need phonics in order to learn how to read.

So we've got to be willing as educators to do things that don't feel fun to us, that feel a little bit old fashioned.

If the evidence is there, if the research is there that yes, students actually do need this, whether it's phonics or math facts or discipline, we've got to be willing to do those things that sound traditional, that sound old fashioned, but still work and are more important than ever.

Let me know what you think.