[The_Liquid_Laser]

My biggest problem with Math Education today is that a lot of kids are not learning their multiplication tables. I used to teach "developmental" (i.e. remedial) mathematics to college students, and the worst problems I would see would be from kids who never learned their multiplication tables. They had to use their calculator for the simplest calculation, and they had no idea if the answer that came out was reasonable.

Now a lot of kids had a variety of other problems, but those could be cleared up just covering the algebra in the class that I was teaching. But in regards to the kids who could not multiply, they had such a hard time learning anything, because they had absolutely no type of "math literacy". They had no intuition of what a correct or incorrect answer would look like. This is like trying to teach literature to kids who can't read most three letter words. There is a basic level of knowledge that needs to be memorized and multiplications tables fit into that category.