Math Facts- To Teach or Not to Teach?

Teaching is a field with constant change and improvement. I myself am always looking for new, cool ways to implement my lessons. But theres one geezer of an idea I will hold dear for my next 50 years of teaching:

Kids.

Need.

Math facts.

That's right, I said it. Kids need math facts. I'm talking old school, rote memory, timed test, single digit whatever, math facts. Listen, I've done this both ways. Despite clinging tight to every minute I have availble for teaching, I absolutely make time for this. It didn't start as a "What does the literature say about this?" kind of thing. It developed naturally over time as I began to see the number of questions marked wrong and how impossible 5th grade tasks are without it. It is insane to ask a 5th grader to complete a long division problem when they are constantly having to use tally marks to add up their numbers or look up each multiplication fact. It takes them forever to complete the problem and without having addition facts, that division problem becomes that much harder. It interupts the process.

And just in case you weren't mad at me yet, I'm going to add that kids need math facts in all four operations. I've seen this huge focus on multiplication math facts (which I love) but really, kids need math facts for addition, subtraction, and division too.

I can yammer on all day about why I think it's necessary, but at the end of the day here's the big truth- Kids perform higher when they have math facts. They just do better. Now I understand in teaching theres got to be this balance. Things need to EARN a spot in your lesson plan because time is limited. But this should be on the list. It's earned it's seat. The science of learning agrees.

Let's hear from some people much smarter than I. The list goes on and on but I'll only include a few easy to understand articles.

Math facts fluency leads to higher order mathematics

Through automaticity students free up their working memory and can devote it to problem solving and learning new concepts and skills (Geary, 1994).  Quite simply, a lack of fluency in basic math fact recall significantly hinders a child’s subsequent progress with problem-solving, algebra and higher-order math concept. 

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It's like a dyslexic kid who can't keep track of the flow of ideas in a long article because he's spending too much brain power (and hence time) on reading individual words...

And while I would agree that some of the very highest areas of math do not require automaticity of basic math facts, they do require automaticity of the skills that fall somewhere in between them and single-digit addition, and that those skills are very difficult to master and to automatize when the basic stuff isn't firmly in place. It's going to be very difficult to get to graduate-level mathematics if you can't hack calculus because you couldn't hack algebra because you couldn't hack middle-school math because you couldn't hack arithmetic.

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There have been many studies on the effects of memorizing the math facts on student performance. The bottom line is that students that memorize the math facts do better in math than students that don't. Why? We can't be sure, but the prevailing theory is that memorizing the math facts frees up the part of the brain that students use for logical thinking, thus allowing them to focus on the problem at hand. Memorizing the math facts has also been shown to boost a student's confidence and reduce their fears and anxiety about math.

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