A parent of a 10th grade student came into school to talk to me the other day. He was helping his son with a Physics assignment, and he said that as they were working through an equation together, he realized that his son didn’t have his multiplication facts mastered. He wanted to come talk to me because I’m his son’s 10th grade math teacher. He wasn’t frustrated with me, but he wanted my advice on what to do about it, and above all, he was just genuinely dumbfounded that no teacher in his son’s educational history had ever brought to his attention that he didn’t know his multiplication table facts.
I wanted to tell this parent that this was the least surprising news I had heard all day and that many of my 10th grade students did not know their multiplication facts. Every year I have a few students who feel the need to tell me this at the start of the school year, and I always reassure them that by 10th grade they will get to use a calculator for most assignments. This masks my true feelings about the situation, which is that it is a huge disservice to our students to allow them to go through elementary and middle school without mastery of these facts.
When I taught 6th grade, I spent the first four months of the school year practicing facts with my students at the start of class each day (we called it the Skill Builder) and then tutoring students who needed more support with mastering the facts. I knew this was important because without fluency with multiplication facts, students would get completely overwhelmed when I taught decimal division later in the year. Their working memory would be overloaded as they tried to hold on to the steps of the procedure while also trying to recall all of their facts. The automaticity with facts also unlocked the ability to reason about whether an answer made sense or compare quantities with fractions. For my high school students, the ones who don’t have fluency with their multiplication facts struggle more to make sense of proportional reasoning problems like triangle similarity problems. They are more likely to fail to catch computation errors in their work. As hard as they may work to gain algebraic fluency with solving equations and substituting into functions, they are always held back by their lack of foundational numeracy.
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