It feels old fashioned in a world of calculators. It is one of the highest leverage things your child will ever learn.
Every few years someone announces that times tables are obsolete because everyone has a phone.
It's a reasonable sounding argument and it's wrong, for a reason that has nothing to do with arithmetic.
It's about space, not sums.
Your child has a limited amount of working memory. It's the mental workbench where they hold a problem while they solve it, and it's small for everyone.
Now give them a Year 8 algebra question. If they have to stop and work out 7 times 6 in the middle of it, that calculation takes up the whole bench. By the time they've got 42, they've lost the thread of what they were doing with it.
A child who just knows 7 times 6 doesn't spend anything. The bench stays clear for the actual thinking.
That's the whole argument. Times tables aren't about arithmetic. They're about freeing up room for everything that comes after.
This is why the effect turns up so far downstream.
Siegler and colleagues (2012) tracked national data sets and found that primary knowledge of fractions and division uniquely predicted algebra results and overall maths achievement in high school, 5 or 6 years later. That held after controlling for IQ, working memory and family income.
Division is times tables wearing a different hat. A child who doesn't know that 6 times 7 is 42 cannot fluently see that 42 divided by 7 is 6, and fractions are built on exactly that.
So the Year 4 kid struggling with tables and the Year 10 kid struggling with quadratics are often the same story, 6 years apart.
Here's the tension. The most common way schools and parents teach tables is the one most likely to put a kid off maths permanently.
Speed tests link maths to threat. For an anxious child, the stopwatch consumes the working memory they need, they underperform, and they conclude they're bad at maths. The tables themselves were never the problem.
Fluency is the goal. A stopwatch is not the only route to it, and for some kids it's the route that closes the door.
Not all 144 at once. There are far fewer facts than it looks. Once your child knows that 6 times 7 and 7 times 6 are the same thing, the mountain halves. The 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s are nearly free. The 9s have a trick. What's genuinely left is a small handful of hard ones, mostly around 6, 7 and 8.
Teach the ones they can already reach. If they know 6 times 5 is 30, then 6 times 7 is 30 plus 12. That's not cheating, it's how fluency starts. Speed comes later and it comes on its own.
Little and often beats a blitz. 5 minutes a day for a term beats an hour on Sunday, comfortably. This is the same spacing effect that makes cramming fail.
Retrieval, not reading. Chanting the list from a page is rereading, and it produces the same illusion of competence. Asking "what's 7 times 8" cold, with nothing on screen, is the thing that builds the memory.
Attach them to something real. Cooking, sport scores, the shopping. A kid who works out that 6 packets of 8 is 48 has done something that means something.
It's fixable, at any age, and it's worth fixing even in Year 9.
A Year 9 student who's still counting on their fingers for 7 times 6 is spending working memory on every single question in an algebra test. Closing that gap does more for their marks than another term of algebra practice.
Nobody wants to teach tables to a 15 year old, which is exactly why it doesn't get done. It's also why it's still costing them.
SubjectMate works through it without a stopwatch and without an audience, which for an older student is often the whole barrier. Year 4 through to Year 9, free trial, and nobody has to know.
SubjectMate asks your child what they know first, then guides them to the answer. Built by a teacher, available every school night.
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