Learning the Math Facts Easily

The key to helping young children enjoy math
by J'aime Ryskind from the July/August 2001 issue of  Homeschooling Today Magazine
Illustration by
Robert P. Adams

Nearly twenty-five years ago, the principal of the school where I was employed announced one day that he had invited a woman to speak to us who was, in his opinion, "the best math tutor in the state of Maryland."

He went on to sing the praises of this woman he called a miracle worker and said that under her tutelage, he had seen kids who had been struggling with math for years turn around dramatically.

He gave her such a buildup that all of us young teachers were sure that this person would be very hip - able to expound on all the latest gizmos from Cuisenaire rods to calculators - and we eagerly awaited her disclosure of the space-age pedagogy that would make learning arithmetic effortless.

On the day of her arrival, she walked into the room, a quiet, modest little woman - wearing no space helmet - carrying only a set of flash cards. And they weren't even commercially printed! She had made her own using index cards and magic markers. Her talk to us went something like this:

"When children hate math or are struggling with it, the reason is that they don't know the math facts. Sharpen up the math tables so the youngster knows them by heart, and his whole outlook toward arithmetic will change dramatically. When a child does not know the tables well enough, he loses his train of thought as he struggles through a problem, and math becomes tedious and agonizing. But if he knows them well, it becomes a wonderful game. The ability to do fast, accurate arithmetic is the best predictor of who will go on to higher mathematics."

Needless to say, it was a short talk. Since that time, I have had numerous occasions to put this advice to the test, and I have always found it to be on the mark.

The ability to do fast, accurate arithmetic is the best predictor of who will go on to higher mathematics.

A couple of years ago, my neighbor asked me to tutor her son, who was flunking fifth-grade arithmetic. As I suspected, he could not recite his tables well enough, and I told his mother that she and I were going to give her son a crash course to learn them. Within a two-week period, his grades began to shoot up, and he was eventually put in the "fast" math section.

Bob Adams, who frequently provides drawings for our Understanding the Arts column, recently told me that he had the identical experience with a fourth-grader he was tutoring in Montgomery, Alabama. The little boy was performing dismally and despised school - particularly arithmetic - until he began to get better math grades as a result of knowing his tables better. The boy received an award at the end of the year for his math. His behavior in school improved as well.

In homeschooling my own children, I made certain that all my students knew their tables perfectly. As a result, they all did well in mathematics through high school and college. The question then becomes, what is the best way to get kids to practice the tables?

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