> Do you want to know what worked? Memorizing times tables. That obviously hasn't worked as most people are quite awful at math and society at large hates it.

> Do you want to know what worked? Memorizing times tables. That obviously hasn't worked as most people are quite awful at math and society at large hates it. Memorizing times tables has been a spectacular failure as has memorizing formulas. Math is about problem solving, not memorizing answers to common things; it's the focus on memorization that's made so many people bad at math to begin with. Common core is an attempt to address this by focusing on how the problem is solved rather than what the answer is, it's freaking parents out, but it is a better approach if you're actually trying to teach math.