It feels bad to imagine a student memorizing their times tables, right? Perhaps I feel that way because I'm a former mathematician, former mathematics teacher, and evergreen Paul Lockhart fangirl, someone who's seen the societal rot stemming from the belief that high-level mathematics is a less creative form of accountancy. But it's bigger than me. As I talked about in Pokopia: The end of history, the dominant ideology1 in pedagogy trains students to be self-sufficient, innovative, flexible, and creative. It's opposed to the idea of creating someone who's good at mindlessly applying technique. Certainly that feels like indoctrination; there's something a little "An acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is one furlough" about it[^belem]. Off the top of my head, though, I can think of two situations where students have been failed by a move away from rote memorization. The first was a student I tutored in algebra who simply did not know their times tables. They had a kindly…
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