We’re living in a technology-driven world.
Calculations can be done in an instant; you no longer even need to reach for
your calculator. A tablet, ipad, laptop or mobile telephone will almost
certainly have a calculator function – you’re never far away from something that
will help you to deal with basic arithmetic if you can’t do it for
yourself. Why, then, is learning times tables in any way
relevant in a modern classroom? You’d be forgiven for thinking that Education
Secretary Nicky Morgan has got it wrong, yet again, when she suggests that all
children should know their times tables up to 12 x 12 by the age of 11. Yet as a
former Maths teacher I’m convinced that knowledge of such essential arithmetic
by the end of primary school is vital. I have a sneaky suspicion though that she
may be correct by accident; right for completely wrong reasons. The unions have
now come out and opposed Morgan, for the puerile and overly-simplistic reason
that ‘everyone has a calculator now’. I speak from personal experience when I
say that this spectacularly misses the point. Shouldn’t the teaching unions be
talking to the maths teachers they represent?There’s a tendency in the Conservative Party to
hark back to the ‘good old days’, to suggest that education has lost something
in recent decades as trendy teaching methods have replaced the traditional, that
a certain amount of learning by rote can be a useful academic exercise and
develop concentration. As a former teacher, I think that’s an over-simplistic
approach which has the occasional grain of truth. Different children learn in
different ways. The modern approach encourages children to develop skills of
problem-solving, which in some ways offers a significant advantage. But it also
risks leaving other children behind. Depending on the subject, or even the
topic, factual learning is vital.
When I learned Spanish at school, there was an
emphasis on vocabulary and verbs. If you don’t learn the words you need to know,
or learn patterns of regular and irregular verbs, you won’t be able to speak the
language. As teaching of modern foreign languages has lessened its emphasis on
such learning, I’ve noticed a decline in the ability of students to speak
correctly in the target language. Recently, on one of the Spanish islands, I was
discussing an image with a graphic designer. He made a change which I hadn’t
requested, and it didn’t look right. “No, the one you had before”, I said. He
undid the change, then said “When English people speak Spanish they always get
the verbs mixed up. But you use them perfectly”. In Spanish (as in English)
there are many past tenses. All I’d done was choose the correct one. Learn a
couple of phrases which use the tenses correctly, drop them into an exam – and
hey presto, you’ve fooled an examiner into believing that you know the tense.
Great for picking up a decent exam grade, but unhelpful for actually using the
language.
Here’s the point: factual learning should never be
done for the sake of it, harking back to some halcyon days that probably never
even existed in the first place. When there’s a genuine educational need, that’s
a different matter altogether. There is such a need for learning times tables,
but I haven’t heard it come from Nicky Morgan’s mouth.
When I was teaching Mathematics, I always found it
far easier to teach a range of topics, from algebra to geometry, from
trigonometry to Pythagoras, to those who already had a basic arithmetic
knowledge. The difference became more striking to me when teaching older
children; at age 15 or 16 it became more important than at age 11. Questions
might require, say, five steps of working out. At different stages, there will
be a need to perform a simple arithmetic calculation. Those who did not know the
answer would either have to work it out, or (if a calculator was allowed on that
examination paper) input the numbers into a calculator. The thought process was
broken; in having to take time to deal with basic arithmetic they would forget
some of the detail of the question. From there, mistakes would creep in. The
student who knew their times tables (and was proficient in adding and
subtracting quickly) was in a position to continue and solve the problem
uninterrupted. Those who possessed basic arithmetic proficiency would
consistently outperform those who did not. If we want to improve mathematical
standards in our secondary schools, then it is important to make sure that we
first improve standards of numeracy in our primary schools.
To take a more advanced example, as a personal
point of professional awareness whilst teaching I made sure that I knew all of
my square numbers up to 50 x 50. If you know that 10 x 10 = 100, then 11 x 9 is
one less than 100, which is 99. Know that 12 x 12 = 144? Then it follows that 13
x 11 = 143. Using that simple trick, and because I knew 23 x 23, I could work
out instantly that 24 x 22 = 528. After learning a few more similar tricks,
two-digit multiplications became very easy for me – though no doubt politics has
dulled some of my sharpness by now.At age 11, knowing your times tables up to 12 x 12
is hugely beneficial. It doesn’t need to be done by government diktat with
league tables created to show how well one school is performing against another.
It doesn’t need to be a cause of stress for teachers worried about how a poor
performance from their class will reflect upon them. All that is needed is for a
renewed focus and emphasis on times tables in primary education. This is the
point that the unions should have focused on: introducing a battery of new tests
ready to be rolled out across the country is a bureaucratic waste of time and
money. Morgan misses the point here once again, but at least she was correct –
albeit for the wrong reasons – on the issue of times tables. Jonathan Arnott MEP
- In The Northern Chronicle.
