All around the tables

Back in the days when tables were taught up to the 12 times table, practice was the first lesson of the day after assembly, until following decimalisation some bright spark at the ministry said it was wrong to force young children to use a vocabulary they could not possibly understand.

The teaching of tables was to be deferred until they were old enough to understand what they were saying, by which time they had lost interest. Teaching became desultory and the impetus was lost.

It was partly resuscitated in the 80s when a small nationwide group of maths teachers was formed by the government to examine new ways of teaching maths and the tables came under scrutiny. They began with the subtle but important distinction between a two times table and a table of twos. A table of twos is 1x2, 2x2, 3x2, 4x2 and so on whereas 1x2, 2x2, 2x3 and 2x4 is not a table of anything.

This led to the important decision that the order in which tables are learned should follow the natural bases of numbers themselves, hence 2x, 4x, later 8x; 5x & 10x; 3x, 6x later 9x. The awkward 7x could be extracted from the other tables plus 7x7.

They realised the importance of breaking each table into its constituent parts to prevent children requiring, say 8x6Êhaving to go back to the beginning and work upwards. Remember David Blunkett famously taking 14 seconds to reach 9 x 9!

The group's report sadly coincided with the new National Curriculum and was shelved, thus wasting a third of a million pounds.

The question is, are the 32 basic facts of multiplication sufficiently important to justify the time spent on them?

Norman Freeman, The Greenlands, Wombourne.

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