Same here Wolf. Maybe its a PA thing?

Well, I agree with wolf about there being a benefit to rote learning as far as things like times tables go, but then, I'm a fan of kids having a broad education which encompasses all sorts of learning styles.

Don't even get me started on what I think about how some teachers and schools teach English these days!

In primary (elementary) school, maths is not just about the maths.

Mental arithmetic is usually one of the first lessons each morning.
Singing the tables gets kids into the daily routine, into the "school brain mode". Pencil-and-paper arithmetic is a warm up for whatever brain exercises will follow.

And at all levels, it has benefits beyond the immediate skill.
The ability to do symbol manipulation with numbers improves the ability to do symbol manipulation in any field, such as grammatical transformations of verbs, etc.
It's like bicep-curls for your brain. Pretty much no-one needs to do bicep curls for a living, but doing bicep curls will improve your ability to do whatever physical task it is you do need to do. Same with the seven times tables and your brain.

I disagree.

I do think that "songs" are not as off putting as other forms of rote learning, but I don't believe they help much -they link all the "facts" together so it's hard to extract the one you want. You might have to start at the beginning until you come to the one you want.

The rote learning is not the bicep curls, the multiplication and division problems are. the rote learning would just be looking at them and flexing them a little.

Rote learning can and does have its uses, I agree. But mostly at a young age, it only serves to help label a subject boring and difficult. Especially in math. Also in spelling, but that lesson has already been learned a little, I think. few kindergartens focus on spelling over content these days. Sure, there are many teenagers today who can't spell worth a damn. There always were, it's just that they didn't used to have internet and iPhones so the evidence wasn't so readily available.

Lots of those old guys couldn't spell, either. Look at Shakespeare.

And here's Robert Burns. He must have typed this with both thumbs:

Whare are you gaun, my bonie lass,
Whare are you gaun, my hinnie?
She answered me right saucilie,
"An errand for my minnie."

O whare live ye, my bonie lass,
O whare live ye, my hinnie?
"By yon burnside, gin ye maun ken,
In a wee house wi' my minnie."

But I foor up the glen at e'en.
To see my bonie lassie;
And lang before the grey morn cam,
She was na hauf sae saucie.

O weary fa' the waukrife cock,
And the foumart lay his crawin!
He wauken'd the auld wife frae her sleep,
A wee blink or the dawin.

An angry wife I wat she raise,
And o'er the bed she brocht her;
And wi' a meikle hazel rung
She made her a weel-pay'd dochter.

O fare thee weel, my bonie lass,
O fare thee well, my hinnie!
Thou art a gay an' a bonnie lass,
But thou has a waukrife minnie.

No doubt it was a manual typewriter at that.

Amazing, indeed. Chiseled those little funny marks right into the stone for you, it would ...

See, to me this kind of stuff was always so frustrating and completely useless. What good does it do?

"What's 9 squared?"
"Er, I don't know--but I know it ends in a 1!"

I had several teachers try to teach us cute little tricks like this, and it always seemed to me that memorizing the tricks was much harder than just memorizing the answer in the first place. But I'm down with monster's method of memorizing the answers organically as part of general learning, rather than drilling them.

6*7 is one of the trouble makers that does need a little effort. I first of all give my kids a little "British Culture" lesson. If you say something is "at sixes and sevens" it means it's all messed up. And we all know the answer to life the universe and everything is 42. Well we do once we've had our British culture lesson. So if every thing is all messed up you put it right with the answer to everything. 6*7 = 42. You wouldn't think it would work if you have to give them the cultural reference first, but it does. And they enjoy yelling 42 at me when they see me in the hall :lol:

There, see, that had a literary reference in it too :)

It's useful when calculating square roots. If the number ends in a 1, you know the square root ends in 1 or 9.

My G-daughter is in 3rd grade and changed schools last month.
She did not know the multiplication tables,
and was placed in a class that is learning division and estimating.

Question: how do you teach division to a child that does not know the X's-table ?

We are having nightly sessions to learn the tables, mainly because
I can't stand watching her try to figure out how many times 7 goes into 42.
She was trying to add 7+7+... and almost always made a mistake.

After learning most of the tables, there are still some combinations that still give her trouble,
so I have used the same approach Monster describes above...
6 sheep in 7 pens, or any silly image that will stick in her mind to simply know 6 times 7 is 42.

And by coincidence, I have also used HLJ's "trick" above with squares
to help trigger her memory.... e.g., how many times 7 goes into 35 must be 5.

So, rote memory, memory tricks, silly images (e.g., to remember people's names)
all help in moving on to the more important issues,
and not being held up trying to figure it out from scratch,
without wasting the most valuable resource... time.

rAMEN!! Preach is sister!

Multiplication Rock, my friend. And she can learn parts of speech and about the constitution and how a bill is passed, too.

When I was a child I did arithmetic recreationally. Yeah, I really knew how to live. I also read a lot.
It's by those two activities that I ended up being (if I do say so myself) a reasonably learned person with the ability to think and know my times tables and what an allegory is.
School was utterly useless and is 85% jumping through hoops and checking boxes, 10% realising that people with authority are almost invariably useless and don't care about you, and 5% trying to remember how to do percentages and the more complex maths. What is Sin, CoSin, and all that other stuff? What is Log? I used to press those buttons on my calculator to get the right answers, but I never understood what they meant.
School really is the most spectacular waste of time and resources.