Students’ calcs in the 70s/80s

[BruceH]

(01-06-2024 07:41 PM)Johnh Wrote:  an aside on rote memorization:

10 years before we even knew what a calculator was, at age 6 or 7, we were having to stand up in class and recite:

"three threes are nine...
four threes are twelve...
five threes are fifteen..." etc

up to the 12x table

It's still pretty useful to have those results stuck in my head, but at the time I was hopeless at them because they were way too boring. So I secretly 'cheated' and made myself a table with a 12 x 12 grid with all the results on it, carefully adding up and checking each entry. And I noticed the easy results and the patterns along each row and column and down the diagonals. And then I didn't need my table anymore!

With more grown-up problems, a similar learning outcome is gained by programming a machine in some way, if you do it in a way that requires insight into the problem.

When I was at Junior School, teachers were still allowed to embarrass laggards, er I mean "display a leaderboard of who was able to recite which table". To progress you had to recite successfully in front of the teacher (during break - not in front of the whole class). You had to go in ascending order so those tricky sevens, eights and nines held a lot of people back until, suddenly, you got the tick for nines, tens and elevens in one go. :-)

We only had to go up to 12 though. My Mum, on the other hand, said she was required to memorise the 20 times table!