Yeah, I know a bunch more of my times table from memory today than I did when I was tested on it forty years ago. But I passed all those tests because of course

Yeah, I know a bunch more of my times table from memory today than I did when I was tested on it forty years ago. But I passed all those tests because of course all you need is know that multiplication is repeated addition and do the addition fast. Today I can tell you that 7 x 7 = 49 but back then I'd have just gone 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 quickly and said "49" for the same answer but a slight delay. Parents who were taught times tables and didn't do much later mathematics are often confused by the way we teach kids today, because they expect we'd try to cram the tables in there, but that's not actually useful, what's useful is seeing the pattern and we'd prefer a child who maybe doesn't know off by heart what 9x8 is but sees the pattern, and whose first question when the teacher finally explains exponentiation and shows how it relates to multiplication, is, "Does this keep going forever?" which yes, it does, there are more hyperoperations and they do keep going like this forever. That child understood the pattern, 9x8 is a problem a calculator can solve, understanding the pattern is something else.